Design of a Pole Placement Active Power Control System for Supporting Grid Frequency Regulation and Fault Tolerance in Wind Farms

Abstract Among renewable energy sources, wind power is expected to contribute a larger and rapidly growing portion of the world's energy portfolio. However, the increased penetration of wind power into the power grid has challenged the reliable and stable operation of the grid. This motivates new opportunities in design and development of novel control schemes capable of actively maintaining the necessary balance between power generation and load, which in turn regulates the grid frequency when plenty of wind is available. This paper presents a novel Active Power Control (APC) strategy based on an adaptive pole placement control approach. The proposed APC strategy is evaluated by a series of simulations on an advanced wind farm benchmark model in the presence of wind turbulences and grid load variations. It is also demonstrated that the APC strategy is able to tolerate against probable occurrence of sudden changes in the generated power which can be caused by torque offset faults in generator/converter actuators of wind turbines in a wind farm.