Dispatchable Generation of a Novel Compressed-Air Assisted Wind Turbine and Its Operation Mechanism

The intermittency of the wind resource and limitation of wind turbines (WT) create underutilization of wind power and a significant barrier to the dispatchability of WT. The industrial solutions to mitigate these issues are to improve turbine electronics and to integrate either storage or a gas turbine with a large regulation capacity to a wind farm. This paper proposes a novel configuration, i.e., a compressed-air-assisted wind turbine (CA-WT), to recycle the mechanical spillage and refill the capacity vacancy, which increases the total generation, and dispatchability of WT. The proposed CA-WT integrates an adaptive structure, which is composed of a continuous variable transmission, variable displacement machine, and air tank, to mitigate the deviation between wind energy and load. We develop systematic models and regulation strategies for each component of the dispatchable CA-WT. Case studies are conducted to compare the performance between the CA-WT and WT in the autonomous and grid-connection operation. The results justified the effectiveness of the proposed CA-WT structure and regulation strategies in realizing a dispatchable wind energy conversion system.