A Fully Distributed Reactive Power Controller for a Wind Farm to Minimize Power Losses

This paper introduces a fully distributed reactive power control method for a wind farm (WF) to minimize the active power losses of its internal network. Based on the modeling of wind turbines (WTs) and internal network of the WF, a receding horizon optimization (RHO) based controller is proposed in this study to coordinate the var output of WTs. To calculate power losses precisely, the power flow model with second-order conic relaxation (SOCR) is presented. As the main concern, the exactness of such SOCR in a WF power flow model is proved. Then, taking advantage of the decoupled nature of branch flow model, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based distributed solver for a WF controller is presented, by which computational burden can be alleviated through parallel computing and no centralized controller is needed. The effectiveness of proposed controller is demonstrated via numerical simulations of a WF.