Abstract
The collector system in wind farm has a large number of cables. When one of the cable fails, the power generated by the wind turbine (WT) cannot be collected into the substation through the faulty cable. That would make the profits for the wind farm reduced. Therefore, it is necessary to find a more reliable cable structure, which can transfer power as much as possible even if the cable failure occurs. In this paper, a new cable connection method is proposed in two main steps to improve both the reliability of the cable connection and the economic. Two different wind farms with the same climatological information and high voltage substation location are investigated and compared in the case study. In the first step, the minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm is adopted to connect all wind turbines (WTs) to the substation. The cables used in collector system are the 33-kV middle voltage alternating current (MVAC) cables. Then the power production generated by WTs is transmitted from substation to the high voltage substation via a 132-kV transmission cable. The initial cable connection layout is obtained in the first step and the total trenching length is optimized to be minimum. In addition, cable selection in each branch can be determined based on the cable current carrying capacity. In the second step, reliability assessment is implemented by analyzing the expected energy not supplied (EENS). Based on EENS, the evaluation index ${LPC}_{rel}$ is obtained. This index takes both reliability and economy into account. Additional cables found by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm are added to the initial cable connection layout. Finally, a cable layout called hybrid structure is formed. What is more, by adding additional cables, the ${LPC}_{rel}$ is reduced by 1.5%. The simulation results clearly indicate that the proposed method is better when the cable failure is considered.
Highlights
With the depletion of fossil fuel, human beings are facing severe energy challenges in recent years
The green rectangle represents the substation location in the wind farm and the red dots indicate the positions of the wind turbine (WT)
To obtain the initial cable layout, a minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm is proposed to connect all of the WTs to the substation
Summary
With the depletion of fossil fuel, human beings are facing severe energy challenges in recent years. When the layout of the WTs has been determined, a reasonable cable connection in the wind farm should be considered carefully. In order to get a better cable connection layout, various topologies are compared in [2] and power system is optimized in terms of the levelised production cost (LPC) and reliability. The double-sided structure of the collector system is presented in [14] and this structure is more suitable for large offshore wind farms It has strong applicability because this method can add additional cables to the original cable structure. The high-reliability topological structure of the collector system, the double-sided ring structure shown in FIGURE 1 (a), is to connect a certain number of WTs through the cable to form a ring. The radical topological structure can significantly reduce the capital cable cost.
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