Assessment of wind turbines impact on the power quality of autonomous weak grids

Wind turbines' impact on the power quality of autonomous weak power grids is investigated in terms of variations in the frequency and the voltage, flicker and harmonics. Laboratory measurements on a wind-diesel hardware simulator are presented for various operational scenarios with different characteristics of the wind speed and the wind turbine. In order to assess the effect of the different parameters of a wind power plant to the power quality of an existing diesel powered system the followed methodology was to compare the power system's behaviour operating with and without wind turbines. Results for all scenarios considering all power quality characteristics are presented and discussed.