Application of STATCOM/BESS for wind power smoothening and hydrogen generation

This paper proposes static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) incorporated with battery energy storage system (STATCOM/BESS) to smooth the line power of wind farm consists of fixed-speed wind generators. Constant output power reference is not a good choice because there may be some cases where wind speed is very low and then sufficient power cannot be obtained. In that case, energy storage device can solve the problem but large energy capacity may be needed. This paper proposes exponential moving average (EMA) to generate the reference output power, and thus the energy capacity of BESS unit can be small. Another salient feature of this study is the generation of hydrogen by using wind energy. At the wind farm terminal, two topologies of hydrogen generators are considered to be connected and their merits and demerits are analyzed. Finally, by taking the advantage of STATCOM/BESS, simple hydrogen generator topology composed of rectifier and electrolyzer is proposed. Detailed modeling and control strategy of hydrogen generator and STATCOM/BESS topologies are discussed and a cooperative control is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified by the simulation analysis using PSCAD/EMTDC. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved