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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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DOE OSTI2016

Analyzing the Impacts of Increased Wind Power on Generation Revenue Sufficiency

The Revenue Sufficiency Guarantee (RSG), as part of make-whole (or uplift) payments in electricity markets, is designed to recover the generation resources' offer-based production costs that are not otherwise covered by their market revenues. Increased penetrations of wind power will bring significant impacts to the RSG payments in the markets. However, literature related to this topic is sparse. This paper first reviews the industrial practices of implementing RSG in major U.S. independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission operators (RTOs) and then develops a general RSG calculation method. Finally, an 18-bus test system is adopted to demonstrate the impacts of increased wind power on RSG payments.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Design and Operation of Power Systems with Large Amounts of Wind Power: Final Summary Report, IEA WIND Task 25, Phase Three 2012-2014

This report summarizes recent findings on wind integration from the 16 countries participating in the International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind collaboration research Task 25 in 2012-2014. Both real experience and studies are reported. The national case studies address several impacts of wind power on electric power systems. In this report, they are grouped under long-term planning issues and short-term operational impacts. Long-term planning issues include grid planning and capacity adequacy. Short-term operational impacts include reliability, stability, reserves, and maximizing the value in operational timescales (balancing related issues). The first section presents variability and uncertainty of power system-wide wind power, and the last section presents recent wind integration studies for higher shares of wind power. Appendix 1 provides a summary of ongoing research in the national projects contributing to Task 25 in 2015-2017.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Validation of Wind Power Plant Modeling Approaches in Complex Terrain: Preprint

The effect of terrain on wind-plant aerodynamics is often neglected due to the complex dynamics that make up terrain-atmosphere-turbine interactions and the computational effort required to adequately resolve the relevant physics. In this work, a comprehensive set of measurements (from the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 2) and two distinct modeling approaches are used to investigate the effects of topography on plant performance. The first approach consists of high-fidelity large-eddy simulations conducted for a one- hour period on a terrain-resolving mesh, and producing unsteady, heterogeneous flow that is sensitive to the local topography. The second approach makes use of a steady-state engineering model that has been modified to account for terrain effects. In situ and remote- sensing measurements upstream of the wind plant are used to prescribe initial and boundary conditions to the models, while wind turbine power measurements are used to assess the ability of the different models to capture the effects of terrain on turbine wake dynamics and therefore power production. The full paper will quantify the degree to which our high-fidelity and engineering models are able to capture realistic wind plant aerodynamics in complex terrain, and through improved understanding of the underlying physics, inform our model development efforts.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Climate change impacts on wind power generation

Wind energy is a virtually carbon-free and pollution-free electricity source, with global wind resources greatly exceeding electricity demand. Accordingly, the installed capacity of wind turbines grew at an annualized rate of >20% from 2000 to 2019 and is projected to increase by a further 50% by the end of 2023. Here, in this Review, we describe the factors that dictate the wind resource magnitude and variability and illustrate the tools and techniques that are being used to make projections of wind resources and wind turbine operating conditions. Natural variability due to the action of internal climate modes appears to dominate over global-warming-induced non-stationarity over most areas with large wind energy installations or potential. However, there is evidence for increased wind energy resources by the end of the current century in northern Europe and the US Southern Great Plains. New technology trends are changing the sensitivity of wind energy to global climate non-stationarity and, thus, present new challenges and opportunities for innovative research. The evolution of climate modelling to increasingly address mesoscale processes is providing improved projections of both wind resources and wind turbine operating conditions, and will contribute to continued reductions in the levelized cost of energy from wind power generation.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Impedance Analysis and PHIL Demonstration of Reactive Power Oscillations in a Wind Power Plant Using a 4-MW Wind Turbine

This paper presents impedance-based analysis, mitigation, and power-hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) demonstration of reactive power oscillations in a wind power plant using a 4-MW Type III wind turbine drivetrain. Because such low-frequency oscillations result from interactions among slower control loops of wind turbines regulating phasor quantities—active and reactive power output of the wind turbine and the magnitude of voltages at the point of interconnection (POI)—a new type of admittance is defined in terms of phasor quantities for their analysis. The so-called power-domain admittance of a wind turbine is defined as the transfer function from the frequency and magnitude of voltages at the POI to the active and reactive power output of the turbine. The power-domain admittance responses of the 4-MW wind turbine are measured using a 7-MVA grid simulator to identify the source of the reactive power oscillations. Power-domain impedance analysis and PHIL experiments are performed to explain how a resonant mode manifests as turbine-to-turbine and plant-to-grid reactive power oscillations. It is discovered that weaker grids exhibiting high inductive impedance mitigate oscillations in the reactive power output of wind power plants; however, a higher grid impedance does not help in damping turbine-to-turbine reactive power oscillations. This paper presents a simple droop-based solution to eliminate both turbine-to-turbine and plant-to-grid reactive power oscillations.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Adaptive Q–V Scheme for the Voltage Control of a DFIG-Based Wind Power Plant

Wind generators within a wind power plant (WPP) will produce different amounts of active power because of the wake effect, and therefore, they have different reactive power capabilities. This paper proposes an adaptive reactive power to the voltage (Q-V) scheme for the voltage control of a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based WPP. In the proposed scheme, the WPP controller uses a voltage control mode and sends a voltage error signal to each DFIG. The DFIG controller also employs a voltage control mode utilizing the adaptive Q-V characteristics depending on the reactive power capability such that a DFIG with a larger reactive power capability will inject more reactive power to ensure fast voltage recovery. Test results indicate that the proposed scheme can recover the voltage within a short time, even for a grid fault with a small short-circuit ratio, by making use of the available reactive power of a WPP and differentiating the reactive power injection in proportion to the reactive power capability. This will, therefore, help to reduce the additional reactive power and ensure fast voltage recovery.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2015

Harmonics in a Wind Power Plant: Preprint

Wind power generation has been growing at a very fast pace for the past decade, and its influence and impact on the electric power grid is significant. As in a conventional power plant, a wind power plant (WPP) must ensure that the quality of the power being delivered to the grid is excellent. At the same time, the wind turbine should be able to operate immune to small disturbances coming from the grid. Harmonics are one of the more common power quality issues presented by large WPPs because of the high switching frequency of the power converters and the possible nonlinear behavior from electric machines (generator, transformer, reactors) within a power plant. This paper presents a summary of the most important issues related to harmonics in WPPs and discusses practical experiences with actual Type 1 and Type 3 wind turbines in two WPPs.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Evaluation of the potential for wake steering for U.S. land-based wind power plants

The wind power plant-wide control strategy known as wake steering involves the misalignment of upstream turbines with the wind direction to deflect wakes away from downstream turbines, increasing net wind plant power production. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of wake steering for U.S. land-based wind power plants. First, we outline a method for simulating and optimizing wake steering control for existing wind plants by combining the flow redirection and induction in steady state wake steering engineering model with the U.S. Wind Turbine Database and Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit wind resource dataset. Next, to better understand the potential benefits of wake steering beyond those for existing wind plants, we evaluate the relative impacts of turbine specific power, turbine spacing, and mean wind speed on energy gain and levelized cost of energy (LCOE) using a model land-based wind power plant. For a subset of 60 existing wind plants, assuming a constant turbulence intensity of 8%, wake steering was found to yield an average annual energy production (AEP) gain of 0.80%, equivalent to recovering 13.85% of baseline wake losses. Further, we present a linear approximation between baseline wake losses and AEP gains that can be used to estimate wake steering gains for other wind power plants. Highlighting additional benefits of wake steering, for the model wind power plant we found that energy gains from wake steering enabled an approximate 30% reduction in turbine spacing while keeping LCOE constant.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2013

Different Factors Affecting Short Circuit Behavior of a Wind Power Plant

A wind power plant consists of a large number of turbines interconnected by underground cable. A pad-mount transformer at each turbine steps up the voltage from generating voltage (690 V) to a medium voltage (34.5 kV). All turbines in the plant are connected to the substation transformer where the voltage is stepped up to the transmission level. An important aspect of wind power plant (WPP) impact studies is to evaluate the short-circuit (SC) current contribution of the plant into the transmission network under different fault conditions. This task can be challenging to protection engineers due to the topology differences between different types of wind turbine generators (WTGs) and the conventional generating units. This paper investigates the short circuit behavior of a wind power plant for different types of faults. The impact of wind turbine types, the transformer configuration, and the reactive compensation capacitor will be investigated. The voltage response at different buses will be observed. Finally, the SC line currents will be presented along with its symmetrical components.

Fault contribution, induction generator, protectio↗
DOE OSTI2016

Managing Wind Power Uncertainty Through Strategic Reserve Purchasing

With the rapidly increasing penetration of wind power, wind producers are becoming increasingly responsible for the deviation of the wind power output from the forecast. Such uncertainty results in revenue losses to the wind power producers (WPPs) due to penalties in ex-post imbalance settlements. This paper explores the opportunities available for WPPs if they can purchase or schedule some reserves to offset part of their deviation rather than being fully penalized in the real time market. The revenue for WPPs under such mechanism is modeled. The optimal strategy for managing the uncertainty of wind power by purchasing reserves to maximize the WPP's revenue is analytically derived with rigorous optimality conditions. The amount of energy and reserves that should be bid in the market are explicitly quantified by the probabilistic forecast and the prices of the energy and reserves. A case study using the price data from ERCOT and wind power data from NREL is performed to verify the effectiveness of the derived optimal bidding strategy and the benefits of reserve purchasing. Additionally, the proposed bidding strategy can also reduce the risk of variations on WPP's revenue.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Limitations of reanalysis data for wind power applications

Wind energy resource estimates commonly depend on simulated wind speed profiles generated by reanalysis or weather models due to the lack of long time series measurements with sufficient coverage at relevant heights (roughly 90 m above ground). However, modeled data, including reanalyses, can be noisy and display a wide range of biases and errors, variously attributed to terrain effects, poor coverage of assimilated inputs, and model resolution. Wind generation records, if available at high temporal and geographical resolution, can provide a proxy for wind measurements and allow for evaluation of reanalyses and weather model wind time series. We use a 7-year-long data set of hourly, plant-level generation records from over 100 wind plants across Texas to evaluate two commonly used reanalysis data sets (MERRA2 and ERA5). Additionally, we use 1-year of records (2019) to evaluate an operational, high-resolution regional weather modeling product (HRRR v3). We find that across the region, and across all modeling products, the modeled representation of wind generation (i.e., wind speeds at hub heights passed through a power curve) has relatively small mean errors when aggregated daily, but that accuracy and hourly correlation have a strong diurnal sensitivity. Accuracy and correlation systematically decline through the evening and markedly improve after sunrise. These diurnal patterns persist even in the highest resolution model tested (HRRR v3). We hypothesize the nighttime decline in accuracy is mostly due to poorly represented boundary layer conditions, perhaps related to model representation of stability, while other uncertainties (such as wake effects) play a secondary role.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Small-Signal Stability Analysis of Large-Scale Power Systems in Response to Variability of Offshore Wind Power Plants

This paper presents a methodology for a small-signal stability analysis of large-scale power systems in response to variability of offshore wind power plants. This study considers the variability of wind power as the source of disturbance introduced to the system. To accomplish this goal, a singular value decomposition-total least squares extended Prony analysis is used to assess the small-signal voltage stability. In addition, a swing-based frequency response metric is used to assess the small-signal frequency stability. The case study here considers the integration of a 1000-MW offshore wind power plant, operating in Lake Erie, into the FirstEnergy/PJM service territory. This study uses a realistic model of the 63 000-bus test system that represents the U.S. Eastern Interconnection. The results verify the utility and practicality of this methodology for the integration studies of offshore wind power plants.

17 WIND ENERGY↗