Apparent Power Loss Based Equivalent Model of Wind Farm Collector System

Recent expansion of utility-scale wind farms has lead to increased concern and interest in studying the interaction of wind farm and the power system network. A suitable equivalent/aggregated model eliminates the need to develop the full detailed model of the wind farm which makes the analysis fast and reliable. Within a wind farm, the wind turbines are interconnected by an electrical network also known as collector system. While aggregating the wind farm, aggregated model of collector system also plays an important role. This paper presents an effective apparent power loss based equivalent model for wind farm collector system while considering the reactive power limits of each wind turbine and wake effect in the wind farm. The proposed approach compares the total apparent losses in pad mount transformer, trunk lines and feeder lines of the detailed and equivalent models. Based on this comparison, values of parameters in equivalent model have been calculated. Test system of HornsRev offshore wind farm has been simulated in PSS/E software and it is found that the equivalent model obtained with the proposed method has the highest accuracy over other methods suggested in the literature.