Flicker Contribution of a Wind Power Plant with Single and Multiple Turbine Representations

In order to study the impact of a wind power plant on network power quality all electrical, mechanical and aerodynamic aspects of wind turbines must be studied. Moreover, the contribution of every wind turbine on the wind power plant should be considered. Representing a large wind power plant by a single wind turbine (WT) or a few wind turbines results in a severer situation with regards to power quality. In the paper, however, a previously introduced wind power plant representation method, so called "quasi-multiple turbine representation (QMTR) method", is used to consider the effect of all WTs of the wind farm. It is shown that Simulink, FAST, AeroDyn, and TurbSim can be used to model the electrical, mechanical, and aerodynamic aspects of a wind power plant with 96 fixed-speed WTs. The model is used to calculate the voltage, active, and reactive powers at point of common coupling (PCC). Flicker is one of the most important power quality measures. It is induced by voltage fluctuations, which are caused by load flow changes in the grid. Modelling of an IEEE standard flickermeter in Simulink environment, instantaneous flicker sensations for two different wind power plant representations are compared. It will be shown that the QMTR method, which considers all WTs of the wind farm shows less flicker at PCC.