Wind parks as power plants

The North American experience in wind park construction tends to large installations, with numerous turbines aggregated in tens, to hundreds, of megawatts. This approach differs significantly from the European experience, where small clusters of only several turbines are more uniformly dispersed over the landscape. The reasons are as fundamental as North America (NA) having the wide-open spaces, with its better wind regime sites being in locales that tend to be remote from its load centers. The consequence of integrating more wind power with other generating resources is that within the last few years the wind park has, by necessity, become regarded by power system operators as needing to meet similar, if not the exact same, operating constraints as their more conventional counterparts. Issues related to voltage and frequency regulation, real/reactive power control, improved operational condition monitoring and report generation, and the opportunity for more intimate grid operator control are challenging wind turbine manufacturers to provide innovative solutions that are revolutionizing the wind industry. The fact that the vast majority of North American installed wind turbines employ induction generators, albeit with varying fundamental control topologies, makes wind different from most other generation resources that use synchronous generators that have the ability to control turbine input energy and field excitation. Efforts to provide standardized interconnection requirements for wind´s induction generators have gained momentum across the US and Canadian markets, providing turbine manufacturers benchmarks for present and future designs