A comparative study of maximum power extraction strategies in PMSG wind turbine system

Since wind availability is sporadic and unpredictable, it is desirable to develop fast and efficient methods to track the optimal operation points of a variable speed wind energy system (WES). The amount of energy captured from a wind energy conversion system (WECS) depends not only on the prevailing wind at the site, but also on the control strategy used for the WECS. In order to determine the gain in energy derived from one concept to another, several autonomous WECS models have been investigated. Many methods have been proposed and discussed in literatures. This paper will discuss methods that pertain to variable speed wind energy systems that use the PMSG generator. These allow easy performance evaluations and comparisons of the different control strategies used.