An adaptive control scheme for variable speed wind turbines providing frequency regulation in isolated power systems with thermal generation

The lack of synchronous inertia, associated with the relevant penetration of variable speed wind turbines (VSWTs) into isolated power systems, has increased their vulnerability to strong frequency deviations. In fact, the activation of load shedding schemes is a common practice when an incident occurs, i.e., the outage of a conventional unit. Under this framework, wind power plants should actively contribute to frequency stability and grid reliability. However, the contribution of VSWTs to frequency regulation involves several drawbacks related to their efficiency and equipment wear due to electrical power requirements, rotational speed changes, and subsequently, shaft torque oscillations. As a result, wind energy producers are not usually willing to offer such frequency regulation. In this paper, a new control technique is proposed to optimize the frequency response of wind power plants after a power imbalanced situation. The proposed frequency controller depends on different power system parameters through a linear regression to determine the contribution of wind power plants for each imbalance condition. As a consequence, VSWTs frequency contribution is estimated to minimize their mechanical and electrical efforts, thus reducing their equipment wear. A group of sixty supply-side and imbalance scenarios are simulated and analyzed. Results of the case study are compared to previous proposals. The proposed adaptive control reduces the máximum torque and rotational speed variations while at the same time maintaining similar values of the load shedding program. Extensive results and discussion are included in the paper.This work was partially supported by ‘Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte’ of Spain (ref. FPU16/04282) and by ‘Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad’, under the project “Value of pumped-hydro energy storage in isolated power systems with high wind power penetration” of the National Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2013–2016, grant number ENE2016-77951-R