Reactive Power and Voltage Control of Offshore Wind Farm Connected to the Grid

Abstract

Wind energy is considered to be a leading source of renewable energy resources. The offshore wind parks are rapidly growing in the last few years, due to the decrease of onshore available area and also the great advantages of offshore wind resources, the offshore wind turbine can be design with large Mega Watt in compare with onshore wind turbine, due to the high speed of wind in offshore areas, also the offshore wind turbine are more stable than onshore, and the annual operation of offshore wind turbines are higher than the onshore wind turbines. As the trend of construction offshore wind parks increases, many challenges appeared in transmitting the generated power from offshore to onshore grid. Reactive power and voltage control are considered to be the big challenges when transmitting the produced power to the utility for long distance of high voltage alternating current (HVAC) submarine cables. These problems made the transmission of power are not complying with the grid code requirements. This research work studies these problems and proposes a solution for solving these issues. Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) was implemented to solve these problems. To investigate the influence of STATCOM on the system, a simulation model was built by using MATLAB Simulink. The results were obtained with and without consideration of STATCOM effect. The simulation results show the critical operation of the system without compensation, the beneficial performance of STATCOM compensation in the system and the optimum operation of STATCOM with conventional tuning of proportional–integral (PI) controller. Also the optimum operation of STATCOM with PI controller using genetic algorithm (GA) for long distance HVAC submarine cables is obtained.