A comparison among reactive power compensation strategies in wind farm power plant

Squirrel cage induction generators are consolidated technologies for wind energy. Nevertheless, they do not perform voltage regulation and absorb reactive power from the utility grid. In this paper a comparison among three different reactive power compensation strategies is presented: centralized, fully decentralized and partially decentralized. The last is the proposal developed in the paper where an optimization problem is solved to individualize optimal sizing and location of reactive power centres. The problem is tested by a case study on a real test grid and encouraging results are presented.