Energy Transmission and Grid Integration of AC Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

This book analyses the key issues of the offshore wind farm's energy transmission and grid integration infrastructure. But, for this purpose, there are not evaluated all the electric configurations. In the present book is deeply evaluated a representative case. This representative case is built starting from three generic characteristics of an offshore wind farm: the rated power, the distance to shore and the average wind speed of the location. Thus, after a brief description of concepts related to wind power and several subsea cable modeling options, an offshore wind farm is modeled and its parameters defined to use as a base case. Upon this base case, several analyses of the key aspects of the connection infrastructure are performed. The first aspect to analyze is the management of the reactive power flowing through the submarine cable. Then, the undesired harmonic amplifications in the offshore wind farms due to the resonances and after this, transient over-voltage problems in the electric infrastructure are characterized. Finally, an offshore wind farm connection infrastructure is proposed in order to achieve the grid code requirements for a specific system operator, but not as a close solution, as a result of a methodology based on analyses and simulations to define the most suitable layout depending on the size and location of each offshore wind farm.