Comparative study on reliability of wind farm collector systems

In this paper, the reliability of wind farm collector systems with different topologies including radiation network, star network and the hybrid of radiation and star network is compared with each other based on the quantitative calculation. Since the wind turbine generators belong to power generation source and the wind farm collector system is nearly the same as distribution system, so this paper combines the equal energy not served principal in reliability evaluation of generation system with the reliability evaluation approaches of distribution network to assess the reliability of wind farm collector system. Specifically, the complicated structures are decomposed into simple portions by networkequivalent method, and then calculate the equivalent outage rate of each portion by the minimal path method. And the reliability indices referrers to both generation system and distribution system, such as the outage time, loss of generation probability e.g. are selected. Last,taking three wind farms with the same wind turbine generator installation but different collector systems as an example, the comparative study on reliability of the above different topologies is implemented in detail. The results show that the wind farm with star configuration has the optimal indexes and is the most reliable one among the above three topologies.