Wind power integration in hybrid power system with active energy management

Abstract

Purpose

The wind speed is very fluctuant and contains a significant energy. Taking into account the turbulent component in the energy management would increase the profitability of the wind‐diesel hybrid system. Sometimes, a diesel generator is used to compensate the requested energy but the storage devices are required to prevent disturbances induced by the wind generator current on the DC‐bus. The purpose of this paper is to show how the battery and flywheel (or ultracapacitors (UCs)) are used to mitigate the fluctuations of the wind generator current. The proposed method is based on the filtering of the wind generator current. The high power density sources (flywheel and UCs) are used in aims to improve the batteries' lifetime, which is estimated, in this paper, by using the rainflow cycles counting method. Spectral studies are made and the simulation and experimental results are analyzed.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is organized according to the following main and sub‐topics: wind speed characteristics, hybrid system energy management, behavioral simulations results, spectral analysis and batteries' lifetime estimation and experimental setup and results.

Findings

The simulations results highlight the interest in using a second‐order filter. The experimental results show that the fluctuations induced by the wind generator current are effectively mitigated by the storage devices.

Originality/value

The spectral analysis of the current for different filters parameters is realized and the application of the rainflow cycles counting method, in this context, is presented. This paper is interesting for the experimental hybrid system design according to the method proposed to control the DC‐DC converters.

Citation

Tankari Mahamadou, A., Camara Mamadou, B., Brayima, D. and Cristian, N. (2011), "Wind power integration in hybrid power system with active energy management", COMPEL - The international journal for computation and mathematics in electrical and electronic engineering, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 246-264. https://doi.org/10.1108/03321641111091548