Wind power smoothing using rotor inertia aimed at reducing grid susceptibility

Due to wind speed variations, the output power of wind turbines fluctuates. This power fluctuation makes the wind power undispatchable. Furthermore, it can cause frequency deviations and power outage particularly when wind power penetration is significant. Energy storage devices such as batteries, ultracapacitors, super inductors, and flywheels can be utilized in a hybrid system to solve this problem. These methods, although, are effective but impose a significant additional cost to the system. This paper presents a novel control method to mitigate the power fluctuations using the rotor inertia as an energy storage component. Therefore, the additional energy storage system is not required. The proposed method is also modified to obtain better energy capturing efficiency. The method is analyzed using mathematical and physical characteristics of the system. The efficiency of the algorithm is evaluated based on obtained equations. The energy extracting capability using this method is comparable with other methods such as Maximum Power Extraction (MPE) algorithm. Simulation results for various cases are performed on a permanent magnet synchronous generator that verify theoretical analysis.