Model Validation of Large Wind Power Plants Through Field Testing

Recently, through efforts lead by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council's Renewable Energy Modeling Task Force, the so-called second-generation generic models were developed for modeling inverter based energy sources such as wind and photovoltaic generation. These models have been industry vetted, and approved, and now reside in several commercial software platforms used throughout North America, and elsewhere in the world. The benefit of these models is their generic nature and being open and publicly available. In this paper, we present a detailed account of field testing five large wind power plants in order to build and validate the dynamic models for the plants using these generic models. Several key insights are highlighted relative to the process and approach to model validation, including some unique circumstances for a few of these wind power plants, which are in close electrical proximity to each other. It is shown that these simplified models are able to match the field tests and yield reasonable and well-behaved models for use in large scale stability studies.