Grid-Forming Inverter-based Wind Turbine Generators: Comprehensive Review, Comparative Analysis, and Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper reviews and compares various grid-forming control strategies for wind turbine generators, highlighting their applications, challenges, and potential to enhance power system stability and reliability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review and comparison of GFM control methods for WTGs, including design, optimization, and application challenges, which were not thoroughly explored before.

Findings

GFM controls improve wind turbine stability under various conditions.

Comparison shows virtual synchronous machine and inertia-based controls are promising.

Challenges include DC-link voltage management and current saturation effects.

Abstract

High penetration of wind power with conventional grid following controls for inverter-based wind turbine generators (WTGs) weakens the power grid, challenging the power system stability. Grid-forming (GFM) controls are emerging technologies that can address such stability issues. Numerous methodologies of GFM inverters have been developed in the literature; however, their applications for WTGs have not been thoroughly explored. As WTGs need to incorporate multiple control functions to operate reliably in different operational regions, the GFM control should be appropriately developed for the WTGs. This paper presents a review of GFM controls for WTGs, which covers the latest developments in GFM controls and includes multi-loop and single-loop GFM, virtual synchronous machine-based GFM, and virtual inertia control-based GFM. A comparison study for these GFM-based WTGs regarding normal and abnormal operating conditions together with black-start capability is then performed. The control parameters of these GFM types are properly designed and optimized to enable a fair comparison. In addition, the challenges of applying these GFM controls to wind turbines are discussed, which include the impact of DC-link voltage control strategy and the current saturation algorithm on the GFM control performance, black-start capability, and autonomous operation capability. Finally, recommendations and future developments of GFM-based wind turbines to increase the power system reliability are presented.