A Reactive Power Dispatch Strategy With Loss Minimization for a DFIG-Based Wind Farm

Abstract

An optimal reactive power dispatch strategy is proposed to minimize the total electrical losses of a wind farm (WF), including not only losses in the transmission cables and wind turbine (WT) transformers, but also losses inside wind energy generation systems. The reactive power dispatch inside a WT uses optimal splitting strategy over the stator and the grid side converter (GSC), which aims to minimize the total loss of the wind energy generation system, including the generator, the converters, and the filters. Optimization problems are formulated based on established loss models and WT reactive power limits. A WF is carefully designed and used for case studies. Wake effect is considered when calculating the active power at each WT. The total losses of the WF are calculated by implementing the proposed strategy at different wind speeds and reactive power references. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.