Intelligent and cost-effective protection schemes for improved reliability of large-scale wind farms

Abstract

Recently, wind power has become a reliable and cost-effective renewable energy source of electricity due to the foreseeable exhaustion of fossil fuel-based power generations and its growing adverse effects on the environment as it is the main source of greenhouse gases. Doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) based wind farm gets the popularity due to its ability for variable speed operation, reactive power control, and reduced converter ratings. Traditional protection schemes result in huge protection failure during fault and abnormality incidents for wind farms since wind turbine fault analysis behavior is different from conventional synchronous generators. Thus, the simple conventional settings for relays would result in maloperation and miscoordination between relays for wind farms and hence, the existing wind farms protection schemes need to be significantly improved.