Hydro-Québec engineers modeled individual turbines and entire wind farms using MATLAB®, Simulink, and Simscape Electrical; generated code from the models with Simulink Coder; and used this code in their multiprocessor environment to evaluate wind farm performance in the context of the power system as a whole.
The engineers built wind turbine models in Simulink using generator, converter, capacitor, harmonic filter, and other power electronics blocks from Simscape Electrical. They also built Simulink models of generator control systems.
To study stability, Hydro-Québec simulated the mechanics of the turbine using a two-mass system model in Simulink that accounted for the pitch of the blade and torsional effects, among other details.
Hydro-Québec engineers assembled a Simulink model of an entire wind farm comprising 73 individual turbine models and the collector network that links them.
Using Simulink Coder, the team generated C code from their Simulink and Simscape Electrical models, which they ran in Hydro-Québec’s Hypersim simulation environment on a 32-processor supercomputer.
In the resulting real-time environment, the team performed hundreds of simulations with varying operating conditions, wind speeds, and fault scenarios.
The simulation results confirmed that their aggregate wind farm model and the entire wind farm model produced the same voltage and current output at the point of common coupling between the wind farm and the power system.
The engineers then ran simulations in which wind farms were integrated with the power system to evaluate equipment needs and assess regulatory compliance. They used Siemens PSS®E software to verify transient stability compliance and MathWorks tools to build robust and accurate EMT models.
Hydro-Québec is using results from the simulations to guide the planning of new wind power plants that will add 4,000 megawatts of capacity to its power system.
