Model based active power control of a wind turbine

In recent decades there has been increasing interest in green energies, of which wind energy is one of the most important. Wind turbines are the most common wind energy conversion systems and are hoped to be able to compete with traditional power plants in near future. This demands better technology to increase competitiveness of the wind power plants.

One way to increase competitiveness of wind power plants is to offer grid services (also called ancillary services) that are normally offered by traditional power plants. One of the ancillary services is called reserve power. There are instants in the electricity market that selling the reserve power is more profitable than producing with the full capacity.

Therefore wind turbines can be down-regulated and sell the differential capacity as the reserve power. In this paper we suggest a model based approach to control wind turbines for active power reference tracking. We use model predictive control (MPC) as our control method. We compare three different control strategies, namely Max-Ω, Constant-Ω and Constant-λ and discuss their drawbacks and benefits by presenting analysis of the steady state operating points and simulations on a high fidelity wind turbine model.