Summary
In response to energy requirements and environmental concerns, renewable energy technologies including wind power are considered to be the potential alternatives. Generally, wind farms are integrated into the grid through a transformer, and its rating depends upon the capacity of wind farms. The fault current of the system to which wind farm is connected changes according to the wind generators in service as well as with the wind speed. The study shows that the existing differential relay for transformer protection mal‐operates during fault interval according to the operating conditions of the wind farm. Under such conditions, the generalized characteristics for the differential relay of the transformer need modification. The protection scheme should be capable of functioning satisfactorily under various dynamic conditions of the wind, which can be achieved through adaptive relaying. In this work, an algorithm for transformer differential protection according to the variation in wind power injection is proposed. A case study of a typical wind farm shows that the proposed algorithm adaptively modifies the settings of the differential relay with varying wind farm currents, according to the wind generators in service, as well as with regard to different wind speed conditions. The modified algorithm is also validated using the experimental setup in the laboratory.