Modified reactive power allocation strategy for large-scale offshore wind turbine considering subsystem configuration

Abstract

Recent research on wind-farm control methods has focused until now on maximising the efficiency and durability of farm operations, as verified for a normalised electrical layout. However, with the increase of turbine size and capacity, it is necessary to develop modifications of the farm management plan that can support the increasing demands of the wind-turbine industry. Here the authors propose a modification that focuses on a proportional reactive power-dispatch method that is applied to radial offshore farm networks. They improve a previously developed method of proportionally distributing reactive power commands by considering the actual configuration of an offshore platform. To confirm the applicability of this method in transient state, they examine case studies using a time-varying signal for a reactive power reference under fluctuating wind. Electromagnetic transients using DC software tools are used to estimate the electrical loss and verify the efficiency of this strategy.