Understanding Inertial Response of Variable-Speed Wind Turbines by Defined Internal Potential Vector

With the rapid development of wind power generation, the inertial response of wind turbines (WTs) has become a topic of wide concern recently, due to its influence on grid frequency dynamics and stability. This paper proposes and defines the inner potential to summarize and understand the inertia control methods and inertial response of type-3 and type-4 WTs, which is analogous to typical synchronous generators (SGs), to make it more easy to understand by system operators and engineers with a traditional power system background. The dynamics of the defined inner potential of the wind turbine without any inertia control is different from SGs, thus the electromechanical inertia is completely hidden. The rapid power control loop and synchronization control loop are the major reasons that the WT’s inertial response is disenabled. On the basis of the defined inner potential’s dynamic, the existing inertia control method for WTs are reviewed and summarized as three approaches, i.e., optimizing the power control or synchronization control or both. At last, the main challenges and issues of these inertia controls are attempted to explain and address