Dynamic behaviour of integrated multiple wind farms during fault conditions on the hosted distribution network

Generation of electricity from wind power, as a renewable energy source, is continually attracting the attention of investors, researchers and electrical utilities. It has been predicted that the annual growth of wind power between 1998 and 2040 would be between 20% and 30%. Consequently, it is expected that wind power would supply at least 20% of the world´s electricity by 2040. These figures show the likely future dramatic increase in the level of wind power based embedded generation penetrating into existing utilities´ networks which occur mainly at distribution voltage levels. Such penetration may take the form of integrating several wind farms into the same network. This in turn raises the importance of understanding the behaviour of wind farms following fault conditions that may develop at any point on the hosted network and consequently may affect the security as well as the quality of electrical supply. This investigation therefore conducted on an electrical supply system with two integrated wind farms which led to learning several aspects about the dynamic behaviour of the two wind farms. It has been found that in a two-wind farm situation the wind farm with the large rated power has predominate effect on the stability of the smaller wind farm. It has been found that the CCT of multiple wind farms can be improved using var injection technique. It has also been found that the best improvement can be achieved by connecting static shunt capacitors to the system at the instant of time that corresponds to that of fault inception.