Design and implementation of power system stabilizers in wind plants

Wind energy, increasing its share in the generation mix, is intended to replace fossil fuel plants in order to reduce green house gas emissions. However, the replacement of conventional synchronous units by wind generators reduces the number of online Power Systems Stabilizers (PSS) and may therefore deteriorate the damping of critical swing modes, leading to a reduction of the power transfer capacity in transmission corridors. Several reports indicate that angular instability, due to insufficient damping and inadequate tuning or disabling of power system stabilizers, is one of the major events that lead and/or contributed to wide area blackouts.;The controller is tested in time domain simulations using a two area four generators benchmark suffering from interarea oscillatory mode within the range of 0.4-0.6Hz. Testing scenarios show the resiliency and effectiveness of the wind based PSS in damping angular oscillations and stabilizing the power system. The damping contribution of the wind stabilizer is found to be comparable to two conventional PSS.;Variable speed wind turbine generators are capable of fast decoupled real and reactive power control. A damping torque can be generated by modulating a fraction of the real and reactive power output of the wind farm. Supplementary active and reactive power control loops are designed and integrated in the wind turbine controls. Operating limits are added to restrict the kinetic energy exchange of the supplementary control loop within a specified turbine speed. An analytical method is developed in order to assess the effectiveness of real and reactive power modulation in damping inter-area oscillations and to justify the use and commissioning of wind based PSS. A wide area measurement based power system stabilizer suitable for wind farms is designed and integrated in the global and local controls of wind turbines. Feedback signals are selected based on an observability index of the selected mode(s). The proposed stabilizer transfer function is derived via a constrained Hinfinity optimization.