Overview of Various Voltage Control Technologies for Wind Turbines and AC/DC Connection Systems

Abstract

Wind power generation is one of the mainstream renewable energy resources. Voltage stability is as important as the frequency stability of a power system with a high penetration of wind power generation. The advantages of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems become more significant with the increase of both installed capacity and transmission distance in offshore wind farms. Therefore, this study discusses various voltage control methods for wind turbines and HVDC transmission systems. First, various voltage control methods of a wind farm were introduced, and they include QV control and voltage droop control. The reactive power of a wind turbine varies with active power, while the active power from each wind turbine may be different owing to wake effects. Thus, QV and voltage droop control with varying gain values are also discussed in this paper. Next, the voltage control methods for an HVDC transmission system, such as power factor control, voltage control, and Vac-Q control, are also summarized and tested in this study. When a three-phase short circuit fault occurs or a sudden reactive power load increases, the system voltage would drop immediately. Thus, various voltage control methods for wind turbines or HVDC can make the system’s transient response more stable. Therefore, this study implemented the simulation scenarios, including a three-phase short circuit fault at the point of common coupling (PCC) or a sudden increase of reactive power load, and adopted various voltage control methods, which aim to verify whether additional voltage control methods are effective to improve the performance of transient voltage. The voltage control method has been implemented in PSCAD/EMTDC, and the simulation results show that the QV control performs better than the droop control. In addition, when applying the voltage control technique during a three-phase fault, transient voltage nadir can be improved through either an HVDC transmission system or an AC transmission system.