Mitigation of Wind Power Fluctuation by Active Current Control of Variable Speed Wind Turbines

Abstract

Wind shear and tower shadow are the sources of power fluctuation of grid connected wind turbines during continuous operation. This paper presents a simulation model of a MW-level doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) based variable speed wind turbine with a partial-scale back-to-back power converter in Simulink. A simple and effective method of wind power fluctuations mitigation by active current control of DFIG is proposed. It smoothes the generator output active power oscillations by adjusting the active current of the DFIG, such that the power oscillation is stored as the kinetic energy of the wind turbine. The simulations are performed on the NREL 1.5MW upwind reference wind turbine model. The simulation results are presented and discussed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed control method.