Impact Analysis of Large-Scale Wind Farms Integration in Weak Transmission Grid from Technical Perspectives

Abstract

The integration of commercial onshore large-scale wind farms into a national grid comes with several technical issues that predominately ensure power quality in accordance with respective grid codes. The resulting impacts are complemented with the absorption of larger amounts of reactive power by wind generators. In addition, seasonal variations and inter-farm wake effects further deteriorate the overall system performance and restrict the optimal use of available wind resources. This paper presented an assessment framework to address the power quality issues that have arisen after integrating large-scale wind farms into weak transmission grids, especially considering inter-farm wake effect, seasonal variations, reactive power depletion, and compensation with a variety of voltage-ampere reactive (Var) devices. Herein, we also proposed a recovery of significant active power deficits caused by the wake effect via increasing hub height of wind turbines. For large-scale wind energy penetration, a real case study was considered for three wind farms with a cumulative capacity of 154.4 MW integrated at a Nooriabad Grid in Pakistan to analyze their overall impacts. An actual test system was modeled in MATLAB Simulink for a composite analysis. Simulations were performed for various scenarios to consider wind intermittency, seasonal variations across four seasons, and wake effect. The capacitor banks and various flexible alternating current transmission systems (FACTS) devices were employed for a comparative analysis with and without considering the inter-farm wake effect. The power system parameters along with active and reactive power deficits were considered for comprehensive analysis. Unified power flow controller (UPFC) was found to be the best compensation device through comparative analysis, as it maintained voltage at nearly 1.002 pu, suppressed frequency transient in a range of 49.88–50.17 Hz, and avoided any resonance while maintaining power factors in an allowable range. Moreover, it also enhanced the power handling capability of the power system. The 20 m increase in hub height assisted the recovery of the active power deficit to 48%, which thus minimized the influence of the wake effect.