Study of the Implementation of Synthetic Inertia in Wind Turbines and its Impact in the Colombian

Abstract

In the upcoming years a large amount of unconventional renewable energy is expected in the Colombian power system due to the reduction of the cost of these technologies and the encouragement given by the national government. This situation is a challenge for the Colombian power system operator (XM) which must guarantee a safe, reliable and flexible operation. The integration of these technologies could cause the displacement of the traditional generation such as hydro and thermal. The unconventional renewable energy based generation does not provide inertia to the system such as the conventional generation. In order to determine the necessity of implementing inertia emulation functionality in non-conventional generation to maintain the frequency’s quality, in this paper this feature is added to Type 4 wind based generators. With the aim of modelling this characteristic an additional control loop was added in the WECC model for Type 4 wind turbine controller. This paper shows the aforementioned adaptation of the WECC model and the impact of implementing this feature in the Colombian power system for a scenario with a high penetration of wind generation. The results shows the benefits of this implementation in the frequency response and allow to define the requirements for this controller regarding power systems characteristics.