Advanced Wind Turbine Generator dedicated protection and control system

Introduction

Usually a wind farm consists of many turbines and technologies, often spread across a large geographic area and typically sited in harsh environments. It is essential to guarantee the stability and consistency of the performance of each wind turbine, by optimizing the protection and control systems of generators. On the other hand, the stable and consistent performance of each wind power generator is the most critical factor to wind farm developers for recovering the initial investment in a short period of time.


Approach

During the last decade, the technology in wind energy has been developed rapidly, which constantly increases the requirements in the installations that generates new needs for Medium Voltage switchgear and associated protection and automation functions. The constant evolution on the field of protection and automation allows us to solve these problems on a technological and cost effective way.




Main body of abstract

The abstract identifies some of the problems and enhancement possibilities detected during the last years and defines their solutions:

• MTBF improvement  Self –powered protection systems
• Need to discriminate internal and external fault in order to accelerate the former  Directional overcurrent protection
• Increase of the nominal power of the WTGs and selectivity Inrush current filtering
• Grid Code compliance (voltage dips and Reactive Power control) Sequential reconnection of the WTGs
• WFs spread around the world  Standardised protection solutions independent from the earthing system
• Remote control and monitoring of the MV variables  Oscillography and event recording for fault analysing, current, voltage and power measuring and IP communications.
• Changes on the protection philosophy due to climatic facts  Different protection settings for different exploitation regimes to be changed automatically



Conclusion

New developments in the field of protection and control device allow us to implement the functions required for solving the above questions in compact systems, which does not affect the current dimensions of these devices. Furthermore, these new developments focus on Plug&Play solutions for getting a more competitive system, in terms of CAPEX & COMMISSIONING savings.



Learning objectives
Field deployment of the described functions is already in progress in different wind farms around the world, in countries as different as U.K., Spain, Thailand, Jamaica, U.S.A. or Belgium, for example.