Model Based Open-Loop Wind Farm Control Using Active Power for Power Increase and Load Reduction

A new wind farm control algorithm that adjusts the power output of the most upstream wind turbine in a wind farm for power increase and load reduction was developed in this study. The algorithm finds power commands to individual wind turbines to maximize the total power output from the wind farm when the power command from the transmission system operator is larger than the total available power from the wind farm. To validate this wind farm control algorithm, a relatively high fidelity wind farm simulation tool developed in the previous study was modified to include a wind farm controller which consists of a wind speed estimator, a power command calculator and a simplified wind farm model. In addition, the wind turbine controller in the simulation tool was modified to include a demanded power tracking algorithm. For a virtual wind farm with three 5 MW wind turbines aligned with the wind, simulations were performed with various ambient turbulent intensities, turbine spacing, and control frequencies. It was found from the dynamic simulation using turbulent winds that the proposed wind farm control algorithm can increase the power output and decrease the tower load of the most upstream wind turbine compared with the results with the conventional wind farm control.