Active power dispatch strategy of wind farms under generator faults

Generator is a critical component of the wind turbine. It transforms the mechanical energy to the electric energy and transmits electricity to the grid. Based on the previous experience, the fault rate of the generator is fairly high which increases the downtime of the turbine. It has a significant effect on the performance and the economic benefit of the wind farm. The traditional wind farm controller adopts the proportional dispatch strategy and does not consider the fault severity. In this paper, a power dispatch strategy of wind farm focusing on the fault condition of the generator is proposed. The main faults are divided into three levels according to their severities. The wind farm controller dispatches power references to wind turbines on the basis of fault level, wind condition and power demand from the grid. When the fault level is high, the strategy gives priority to protect the generator. If the fault level is not high, the wind farm should follow the power demand. In addition, the wake effect is also an important factor that must be taken into account in the wind farm control. Because it can affect the power production directly. To verify the advantage of this strategy, it is compared with the proportional dispatch strategy in the simulation. The result shows that the proposed strategy can make a good trade-off between component protection and power production.