Optimal Penetration of Combined Wind DG and VAR Compensation for Voltage Stability Improvement

Abstract

Integration of wind based Distributed Generation (DG) into the power grid has become a major concern for power system engineers today. Voltage stability is a key factor to achieve a successful integration of wind power into power grid that needs to be addressed and analyzed. The level of voltage stability/instability depends, amongst other factors, on the penetration level of wind generation and on level of parallel reactive power (VAR) compensation. Therefore, it becomes imperative to determine the optimal penetration level of wind DGs as well as optimal VAR compensation when integrated into a weak power grid. This paper presents an optimization algorithm to determine the optimal penetration level of combined large-scale wind DG and VAR compensation to minimize total investment cost considering the voltage stability limit as the main technical constraint. In addition, variation of wind capacity factor due to wind speed uncertainty has been considered in this study. Simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.