A Grid-Side Subsynchronous Damping Controller to Mitigate Unstable SSCI and Its Hardware-in-the-loop Tests

Abstract

It has become a great challenge to mitigate the unstable subsynchronous control interaction (SSCI) in practical series compensated wind power systems, mainly because of the system-wide influential factors, such as the constantly changing wind speed, number of in-service wind turbines, and operating conditions. In an effort to address the challenge, this paper proposes a simple yet practical grid-side subsynchronous damping controller (GSDC), which consists of a subsynchronous damping controller (SDC) supplemented to a subsynchronous current generator (SCG). The GSDC utilizes bus voltages and line currents as feedback signals and injects currents at the subsynchronous frequency into the system to provide active damping. The parameters of the SDC and SCG can be optimized for any system facing SSCI issues. In this paper, a GSDC is developed and optimized over an EMT model of a realistic system. The proposed scheme has demonstrated its effectiveness and robustness through controller-hardware-in-the-loop tests for mitigating SSCI over a wide range of operating conditions. This paper has paved the way for the commissioning of a practical GSDC in a real-world system that has experienced unstable SSCI incidents.