Impact of Collector Network Aggregation of Solar and Type 4 Wind Farms for Short Circuit Studies

With increasing interest in renewable energy gener-ation, grid integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), such as solar photovoltaic (PV) plants, wind turbine farms, and energy storage systems have become more common. These connected DERs usually consist of inverters, pad-mounted transformers, and collector feeders. As the size and number of PV plants and wind farm increases, it becomes challenging for power system planners to study their impact on the power system, since it is not practical to represent all individual inverters, transformers and feeders to conduct simulations. This paper examines the impact of aggregating the collector network in a solar farm and a type-4 wind farm, employing two aggregation techniques. The first represents the collector network with an equivalent impedance and a shunt capacitance, while the second assumes that the impact of the collector is negligible.