Comparative analysis between harmonic distortion mitigation techniques produced by wind power inverting units

Abstract

With the increase of wind farms, the relationship between these installations and the issues related to the quality of the electric power, with emphasis to the harmonic distortion effect, are considered as a matter of great concern. This is attributed to the connection devices of such technology with the commercial networks, i.e. the frequency inverters. Regarding the power quality indexes, regulatory agencies clearly establish limits to the several phenomena associated to transmission and distribution operation with non-ideal conditions. In case of violation of the standard values, compensation procedures are to applied to guarantee the admissible values. These include the use of active or passive filters, which, represent relevant investments, with significant impacts upon the costs of the projects and devices. In this context, in addition to the traditional use of passive filters, this paper is focused on a strategy to mitigate harmonic generation using an approach based on intrinsic switching control of the connection inverter units. Within this context, the fundamentals of such technology are presented and, based on computational simulation, studies are carried out to highlight the methodology efficacy at accomplish the harmonic compensation. Both passive and active filtering methodologies are considered and compared.