Optimal STATCOM controller for enhancing wind farm power system performance under fault conditions

Harnessing wind energy for producing electrical power becomes vital and essential now a day in our communities. However the large penetration of wind farms into the electrical power grid affects the dynamic performance of grid especially during abnormal conditions. STATCOM FACTS device is employed for mitigation the voltage sage and improving power quality at the point of common coupling (PCC) where large scale wind power plants (WPP) are connected to grid during faults period. PI regulators with classical gain tuning are the most common procedure used for controlling the STATCOM performance. In this paper the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ant colony optimization (ACO) as evolutionary methods are adopted to obtain flexible and reliable PI parameter tuning for cogging and improving STATCOM dynamic behavior during voltage sage occurrence. The main contribution of using STATCOM is to obtain an adequate fault ride through for wind driven doubly fed induction generator that can track the grid code requirements. So the impacts of deep voltage sage introduced to 9 MW wind farm DFIG and connected to 120 kV power grid are investigated by using Matlab/Simulink program. Results obtained show the effectiveness of the proposed PSO and ACO methodologies.