Investigating the impact of wake effect on wind farm aggregation

Aggregation methodologies for creating equivalent wind farm models are needed for power system transient stability studies involving large wind farms. One strong argument in the literature suggests single machine equivalent representation of wind farm with the assumption that all wind turbines receive the same incoming wind speed and thus operate at the same loading condition. In this paper, we examine how the validity of such single machine equivalent is affected under different wind speeds across a feeder in a wind farm with many WTGs. In particular, we compare the total active power output from the WTGs which indicates significant difference between single machine equivalent and full wind farm model under certain wind speed ranges and distances between the WTGs. We then conclude the need to use multi-machine equivalent representation for large wind farm in order to achieve adequate accuracy under the full range of wind conditions.