Control of Energy-Intensive Load for Power Smoothing in Wind Power Plants

Uncertainty of the wind power output is the main influence factor for wind power utilization in the bulk power system. Because of the large capacity and the load characteristic, energy-intensive load holds great potentials to share the burden of wind power fluctuation smoothing. In this paper, a direct control scheme of the energy-intensive load power is proposed to smooth the wind power fluctuation. Based on the characteristic of the energy-intensive load production technology, the feasibility of energy-intensive load control and its influence on the production are discussed. A feedback control is designed to regulate the saturable reactor and transformer tap changer when the power support from the bulk power system is limited. Regulation capacity is analyzed quantitatively based on the energy-intensive load equivalent circuit model. A grid-connected energy-intensive enterprise driven by self-generation wind power plants and thermal power plants is studied as an example case. By the proposed energy-intensive load control scheme, power fluctuation of the wind farms can be smoothed with the minimum control cost. Besides, the regulation requirement of the bulk power system is eased correspondingly so that the utilization capacity of the power system can be improved significantly. Simulation is done on the real-time digital simulator to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.