Dynamic stability improvement of an integrated grid-connected offshore wind farm and marine-current farm using a STATCOM

This paper presents a control scheme based on a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) to achieve both voltage control and damping enhancement of a grid-connected integrated 80-MW offshore wind farm (OWF) and 40-MW marine-current farm (MCF). The performance of the studied OWF is simulated by an equivalent doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) driven by an equivalent wind turbine (WT) while an equivalent squirrel-cage rotor induction generator (SCIG) driven by an equivalent marine-current turbine (MCT) is employed to simulate the characteristics of the MCF. A damping controller of the STATCOM is designed by using modal control theory to contribute effective damping characteristics to the studied system under different operating conditions. A frequency-domain approach based on a linearized system model using eigenvalue techniques and a time-domain scheme based on a nonlinear system model subject to various disturbances are both employed to simulate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. It can be concluded from the simulated results that the proposed STATCOM joined with the designed damping controller is very effective to stabilize the studied system under disturbance conditions. The voltage fluctuations of the AC bus subject to the active-power variations of the studied system can also be effectively controlled by the proposed control scheme.