Overview of Important State-of-the-Art Technologies in Offshore Wind Energy Systems

Modern wind plants in offshore wind farms have grown in capacity into facilities that can no longer be ignored in transmission planning studies. Additionally, a large penetration of wind generation in an offshore wind farm into the power system will bring a number of challenges on system planning, operation, and impact analyses. This paper will provide an overview of the important state-of-the-art technologies in offshore wind energy systems, including the designs on internal electric system of an offshore wind farm, transmission system to shore, generator type, system frequency, transmission cable, communications medium and SCADA system, offshore substation and transformer. Additionally, the development on reactive power compensation, collection grid topologies, redundancy design for improving system reliability, power quality standard and measurement, and protection scheme on switching transient will also illustrated in this paper.