An Optimized Decentralized Power Sharing Strategy for Wind Farm De-Loading

Many centralized and distributed power sharing algorithms have been proposed in the literature for de-loading operations in wind farms with variable speed wind turbines. Typically, in these strategies, two-way communications are required between the control center and the single turbines, or among the turbines. This paper solves the same problem in a truly decentralized fashion, which only requires a greatly reduced amount of one-way communications, without exchanging information among the turbines, and shows that an optimal solution can be obtained to minimize utility functions of interest of single wind turbines. In particular, we consider utility functions that take into account mechanical fluctuations and rotor over-speeds during transient, while balancing the utilization of wind turbines at steady-state operations. This is achieved by adopting the so-called Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithms, which are frequently used in communication applications, for solving the power sharing problem in a decentralized fashion. Extensive simulations under different working conditions, on wind farms consisting of wind turbines of different mechanical characteristics, are provided to illustrate the potential and the efficiency of the proposed methodology.