Virtual Resistance Control for Sequential Green-Start of Offshore Wind Power Plants

The changing energy landscape due to the large scale integration of renewable energy and shutting down of conventional thermal plants has opened up the potential of alternate sources in the blackstart services market. Grid forming wind turbines can do controlled islanded operation independent of an external grid voltage and thus participate in network restoration from the start. However, it is necessary to study the capability of wind turbines to deal with the demanding energization transients in a controlled and stable manner. This work investigates the feasibility of using virtual resistance in the wind turbine converter control to reduce transients during self-transformer inrush and sympathetic interaction from downstream string transformers. This can eliminate the need for pre-insertion resistors during sequential energization. The sensitivity of the AC current and voltage output along with DC link transient to the virtual resistance parameters has also been analyzed using PSCAD simulations. Finally the effectiveness of the proposed method for offshore network energization by a grid forming wind power plant has been tested by comparing to results for a pre-insertion resistor.