Impact of large offshore wind farms on power system transient stability

This paper deals with the impact of large scale wind power integration on the transient stability performance of power systems. Typical offshore wind farm topologies including the medium and high voltage submarine cables, the generator, the multi-stage transformers, the controllers were simulated using real-world values. Voltage and power at the point of common coupling and the swing curves of conventional synchronous generators following a major grid fault were computed and the critical fault clearing times were determined and compared with one another for different levels of wind integration. It was found out that using the currently established controller structure and parameter settings, the transient stability performance of the system deteriorates with increasing wind integration. The study has also revealed that there are a range of options to improve the performance of the system even to the extent of improving on the performance of the system beyond the baseline scenario where there is no wind power generation at all.