Supergen Wind Hub: D3.2 Report on Wind Farm Control Algorithms to Meet Power Systems Requirements

In this report, the investigation of wind farm control with the objective to meet power systems requirements is reported. It is shown that the full range of ancillary services including frequency support can be provided at the farm level. The architecture of the wind farm controller is hierarchical, decentralised and scalable. Although, only very weak feedback control is introduced at the turbine level, reasonably tight control is achieved at the wind farm level. It is demonstrated that offshore wind farms can be made to operate as virtual conventional plant through the Generator Response Following concept, whereby the power output of the farm is slaved to the power output from a small synchronous generator situated at the onshore end of the connection-to-shore. The sensitivity to communication delays and mitigating strategies are explored. The StrathFarm simulation tool has been used extensively in this work to evaluate the loads each turbine experiences when farm level control is used to provide ancillary services.