Modeling and identification of harmonic instability problems in wind farms

In power electronics based power systems like wind farms, the interactions between the inner control systems of the power converters and the passive components may lead to high frequency oscillations, which can be called harmonic instability. In this paper, a simple methodology is presented to identify harmonic instability problems in wind farms, where many wind turbines, cables, transformers, capacitor banks, shunt reactors, etc, typically are located. This methodology introduces the wind farm as a Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) control system, where the linearized models of fast inner control loops of the grid-side converters are considered. Therefore, instability problems of the whole wind farm are predicted based on the poles of the introduced MIMO system. In order to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed analytical approach, time-domain simulations are performed in the PSCAD/EMTDC software environment for a 400-MW wind farm. The proposed analytical analysis method and time-domain simulation results show that both dynamics of the power electronic converter and the parameters of the passive component can effect on the wind farm stability.