Power flow control in a substation of a wind- and solar farm

Abstract

The goal of this graduation project was to design a state-of-the-art central farm controller. The designed central farm controller distinguishes itself from prevailing controllers by including a subsystem (the optimisation unit) that contributes to an improvement in power transmission effciency, decrease in maintenance costs and an increase in system reliability/robustness. This thesis describes the design process of the optimisation unit and the verifcation of its feasibility. Originally, the plan was to test the design on a remote terminal unit (RTU), but unfortunately due to the current crisis, this was not possible. Therefore, the implementation and testing were carried out only in MATLAB. Tests were performed using a MATPOWER system model which has been derived from a real wind farm topology. The optimisation unit makes use of a meta-heuristic algorithm to solve an optimal reactive power flow dispatch optimisation problem. In this thesis, the feasibility of this optimisation unit is investigated. Furthermore, it is determined which devices should be controlled and of which the usage is optimised. This makes the treated optimisation problem a multiple objective optimisation. Lastly, the robustness is verified by extending the topology and testing the solutions of the optimisation unit.