Computation of Required Reactive Power Support of WPP in Systems with High Wind Generation

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to determine the adequate percentage of reactive power compensation required to provide an appropriate voltage support and mitigate the impact caused by the massive installation of Wind Power Plants (WPP) in a power system. Mainly, the impact in the system's loadability and the improvement achieved by installing several STATCOM to provide reactive compensation are measured through a probabilistic loadability margin that considers the intermittent behavior of the wind. In addition, the point estimate method is applied to give a stochastic characteristic to the analysis and to determine the statistical mean and standard deviation that are key values to identify the impact of WPP and the necessary reactive supply. This methodology is implemented in the IEEE New England test system (39 Bus) by comparing the statistical mean of loadability margin between an initial case and multiple cases considering different participation percentages of WPP (between 9% to 33%) and different percentages of reactive power compensation injected (between 15% to 75%) under normal operation conditions and considering N-1 contingency scenarios.