Leader-Following Diffusion-Based Reactive Power Coordination and Voltage Control of Offshore Wind Farm

Abstract

This paper proposed a distributed reactive power coordination and voltage control of offshore wind farm based on the leader-following diffusion algorithm. Designating several wind turbine generators (WTGs) as the leaders to receive the information of voltage at point of common coupling (PCC), the reactive power generations required to minimize the voltage deviation could be computed by these leaders. The required reactive power generations are diffused throughout all WTGs by the diffusion algorithm, resulting in the coordinated operation of WTGs to regulate the PCC voltage. The proposed offshore wind farm controller is based on the hierarchical control strategy, which consists of primary and secondary layers. The primary layer is responsible for the inner current, voltage or power regulations whereas the secondary layer is based on the proposed diffusion algorithm to achieve the coordinated operation among WTGs. The proposed strategy could maintain accurate reactive power sharing among WTGs and regulate the PCC voltage. A comparison study with the conventional consensus-based control is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed diffusion controller. The comparison results show the better performance of the proposed method in terms of dynamic responses of PCC voltage and reactive power coordination. Simulation scenarios of constant wind speed, variable wind speed, and voltage sag in the utility grid are carried out to evaluate the performance of proposed method. The proposed diffusion control is tested either in a small or large offshore wind farm systems. Effect of communication delay on the performance of proposed diffusion control is also described. An experiment of the small-scale wind farm system is conducted to show the feasibility of proposed diffusion strategy.