Load flow analysis with wind farms

Abstract

Renewable energy has provided an alternative to the utilities to have sustainable development, over the rising concerns of environment degradation. Amongst the various renewable energy sources, wind energy has a significant contribution to the power generation, worldwide. The power generated through them depends on several factors, such as weather and location, which makes it stochastic in nature. As a result, it is difficult to schedule power generation to maintain the power balance. To perform this planning, load flow analysis (LFA) is a vital tool. It allows accessing the information related to the line flows, reactive power, and voltage levels at different buses. The conventional LFA do not include a model of the generators, as the generation capacity can be manipulated, easily. However, in case of LFA with wind energy sources, the power generated depends on external conditions, i.e., wind speed. So the generation capacity at any instant of time should be easily accessible. This requires the inclusion of modeling of generators. This chapter reviews the performance of commonly used wind generator (WG) models, namely PQ model, RX model, three-node model, and probabilistic models for the LFA. The conventional PQ and RX models are based on some assumption, which is eliminated in their modified versions. Based on these models, the LFA is performed using Newton–Raphson (NR) method. To validate these models developed are simulated using the MATLAB. Based on results, the RX models are found suitable for the individual machines, and probabilistic models are suitable for wind farm analysis.