Comparative evaluation of reactive power compensation methods for a stand-alone wind energy conversion system

This paper provides a comparative performance evaluation of four different reactive power compensation approaches for a stand-alone wind energy conversion system (WECS), composed of a wind turbine and a squirrel-cage induction generator (SCIG), and feeding a constant balanced 3-phase inductive load. The reactive power compensation schemes investigated are: fixed-capacitor bank, switched-capacitor bank, static Var compensator (SVC), and static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). The simulation results obtained from MATLAB/SIMULINK prove the superiority of SVC and STATCOM over the other two schemes in voltage regulation and ensuring a constant voltage profile. A detailed comparison between the performances of SVC and STATCOM is also presented.