A power hardware-in-loop based testing bed for auxiliary active power control of wind power plants

Auxiliary active power control (AAPC) of wind power plants (WPP) has been an emerging subject of modern power systems. However, there is currently lack of appropriate platform to test AAPC performances of an actual WPP. Under the background, this paper presents a testing bed for AAPC in both frequency regulation and damping control of WPP. The main novelty is that the platform is designed based on power hardware-in-loop (PHIL) technologies. PHIL technologies enable a physical WPP to integrate to a virtual real-time power system, which is simulated with StarSim software. The technologies combine the advantages of software and hardware simulations. Based on the testing bed, this paper compares the frequency regulation and damping control performances of an aggregated wind farm integrated to an isolated system. The PHIL simulation results demonstrate the strength of the platform, which extends the flexibility of system configurations of software simulation to an actual physical WPP experiment. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.