Adaptive Response Method for Communication Failures of Hierarchical Reactive Power Control in Wind Farms

Advanced controllers have been widely introduced in power system-related research to alleviate the uncertainties of renewable sources. The performance of the controllers should be verified in a realistic environment before the controllers are used in practical applications. This study focuses on voltage regulation of wind farms in voltage drop cases where communication failures occur and discusses modifications done on the online wind farm management system. The modified management system is designed to respond to a voltage drop when the outer reference signal from the upper-level controller is absent due to technical problems, especially communication errors. Such a situation has not been considered in most of the management systems in the literature. The predictable situations in real fields have been further verified under the hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment RTDSTM. During communication failure, the proposed method can respond automatically to voltage recovery, along with a designed objective function. A comparative analysis of actual control modes was also conducted to prove the relevance and effectiveness of the proposed method.