Harmonic instability source identification in large wind farms

A large-scale power electronics based power system like a wind farm introduces the passive and active impedances. The interactions between the active and passive impedances can lead to harmonic-frequency oscillations above the fundamental frequency, which can be called harmonic instability. This paper presents an approach to identify which wind turbine and which bus has more contribution to the harmonic instability problems. In the approach, a wind farm is modeled as a Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) dynamic system. The poles of the MIMO transfer matrix are used to predict the system instability and the eigenvalues sensitivity analysis in respect to the elements of the MIMO matrix locates the most influencing buses of the wind farm. Time-domain simulations in PSCAD software environment for a 400-MW wind farm validate that the presented approach is an effective tool to determine the main source of the instability problems.