Active power dispatch method for a wind farm central controller considering wake effect

Abstract

With the increasing integration of the wind power into the power system, wind farm are required to be controlled as a single unit and have all the same control tasks as conventional power plants. The wind farm central controller receives control orders from Transmission System Operator (TSO), then dispatch the wind power reference to each wind turbine. One of the most commonly used dispatch methods is to dispatch the wind power reference to each wind turbine proportional to each wind turbine's available wind power without the consideration of the wake effect. The wake which depends on the thrust efficient of upstream wind turbines in the wind farm influences the downstream wind speed which determines the available wind power of the downstream wind turbine. Optimize the wind power production of each wind turbine in the wind farm by the optimization of the pitch angle and tip-speed-ratio of each turbine can increase the total available wind power of the wind farm. This paper proposed a new dispatch method which dispatches the wind power reference to each wind turbine proportional to each wind turbine's optimal wind power to increase the available wind power of the whole wind farm. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to obtain the optimal wind power for each wind turbine. A case study is carried out. The available wind power of the wind farm was compared between the traditional dispatch method and the proposed dispatch method with the consideration of the wake effect.