Protection & Control Systems of Wind Farm Power Plants

Book excerpt: There are a number of books in the market about wind energy, turbine controllers, modelling and different aspects of integration of Wind Farm Power Plants ( WPP) to grids. But none of these books meets the expectations of design and field engineers/technicians to address directly the setting and design philosophy of different Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) of WPP networks. This book provides practical applications of numerical relays for protection and control of different parts of onshore & offshore WPP network namely wind turbine generator, collector feeder and EHV interconnection transmission line to grid. In addition required changes to existing special protection system (SPS) and run-back scheme by adding a new WPP are discussed. The topology and characteristics of WPP networks are different from convectional one for both onshore and offshore WPP. In addition the fault current contribution from wind farm generators are low (1.1-1.2 pu). These causes significant challenge for setting and design of IEDs of WPP in order to meet the common industry practice requirement with respect to reliability, sensitivity, stability, security and grading coordination. The author believes that this book may be unique with respect to addressing these challenges and provision of the mitigation techniques to rectify the deficiencies of existing industry practice which otherwise have not been discussed for real systems in any other book. The content of this book have been successfully applied in the field for various WPPs projects and consequently can be used as a practical guideline for implementation for future projects. The content of the book covers Principal of Operation of WPP , Modelling of different com ponents of WPP, Short Circuit current and voltage characteristics of different type of wind turbine generators, Setting and Design of Protection systems of WPP Network , Design of Control systems of WPP, Lightening and Overvoltage Protection of WPP and Analysis of Disturbance on the WPP networks