Analytical Approach to Understanding the Effects of Implementing Fast-Frequency Response by Wind Turbines on the Short-Term Operation of Power Systems

The significant presence of variable-speed wind turbines in worldwide power systems has led to planners and grid operators requiring them to participate in frequency control tasks. To address this demand, a large number of wind frequency control proposals have been reported in the literature in recent years. Many of these solutions have been tested by specific experiments carried out in computer simulation environments. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the effects of enabling frequency support by wind turbines on the magnitudes that characterize the inertial response of a power system by using an analytical approach. The derived formulation and the illustrations are designed to provide a better understanding of both the mechanisms that determine the frequency stability indices and the improvement achieved by enabling the inertial response of wind turbines by implementing a virtual inertia-based method on the active power controllers of these machines. To facilitate the comprehension of the results obtained, the analytical approach is complemented with time-domain simulations in a predefined test system implemented in MATLAB/Simulink(R). The proposed methodology achieves a generalization of the results and can be used for the assessment of any power system configuration.

Automated summary

The paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the effects of enabling frequency support by wind turbines on the magnitudes that characterize the inertial response of a power system. The analytical approach is complemented with time-domain simulations in a predefined test system, providing a better understanding of frequency stability indices and improvement achieved by enabling the inertial response of wind turbines.