A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach to Active Power Control of Wind Farm

With more and more wind farms integrated into the power grid, the stability and security of the grid can be significantly affected by the wind-farm-generated power, due to the intermittent and volatile nature of the wind-farm-generated power. Therefore, control of the wind-farm power to meet the stability and quality requirements becomes important. Active control of wind-farm power, however, is challenging because the wind-farm output power can only be reliably predicted for a short period of time (i.e., ultrashort term power prediction), and large variations exist in the wind-turbine output power. In this paper, an optimal active power control scheme is proposed to maximize the running time of each wind turbine, and minimize the on-and/or-off switching of wind turbines, resulting in substantial reduction of wind-turbine wear and thereby, maintenance cost, and extension of wind-turbine lifetime, all together, a significant saving of operation cost of the whole wind farm. The proposed approach is illustrated by implementing it to the active power allocation of a wind-farm model in simulation.