Ancillary services from wind turbines: automatic generation control (AGC) from a single Type 4 turbine

Abstract

Abstract. Wind turbines possess the technical ability to provide various ancillary services to the electrical grid. Despite this, renewable generators such as wind and solar have traditionally not been allowed to provide significant amounts of ancillary services, in part due to the variable and uncertain nature of their electricity generation. Increasing levels of renewable generation, however, continue to displace existing synchronous generation and thus necessitate new sources of ancillary or system services. This work is part of an ongoing project that seeks to provide empirical evidence and an examination of how ancillary services can be provided from commercially available wind turbines. We focus specifically on providing secondary frequency response (automatic generation control or AGC) and demonstrate that wind turbines have the technical capability to provide this service. The algorithms used are intentionally simple so as to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of the turbine technology. This work presents results from a single, 800 kW, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Type 4 wind turbine. A total of 10 % of rated power is offered on the regulation market. We do not separate up- and downregulation into individual services. Upregulation is offered through a 5 % constant power curtailment. The AGC update interval is 4 s, to mimic real-world conditions. We use performance scoring methods from the Pennsylvania–Jersey–Maryland (PJM) operator and the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada to quantify the wind turbine's response. We use the calculated performance scores, annual site wind data, and 2017 PJM market price data to estimate income from providing secondary frequency regulation. In all cases presented, income from the regulation market is greater than the energy income lost due to curtailment.

Research Priorities and Opportunities in United States Wholesale Electricity Markets

“…Wind and solar plants can be a source of ERS (Milligan 2018), and various demonstrations show that wind and solar have this capability (Loutan et al 2017;Loutan and Gevorgian 2020;Rebello et al 2020). Some balancing authorities have multiple years of operating experience integrating wind into automatic generation control (Chernyakhovskiy et al 2019).…”

Energy Storage on a Distribution Network for Self-Consumption of Wind Energy and Market Value

“…The values from the actual provision of the ancillary services are not included because the actual provision of the services is usually within very short times [18] and the exact amount of the services provided may not be pre-determinable since the services are demanded by the electricity grid only during special operating conditions, maintaining the stability of the grid. The values accounted for here are only for the service "commitment," and not for the actual performance: the value derivable from connecting the storage device to the grid and making certain capacities available for charging or discharging in supporting the grid during operational emergencies.…”

“…Instead of feeding the excess locally generated wind energy to the grid, the work examines installing a 2 MW/4 MWh storage device to capture the excess energy-to increase self-consumption of wind energy while also using some capacity of the storage device for providing certain ancillary services to the grid. As reported in [18], wind turbines could be deployed to provide grid services; in this work, only the storage device is deployed for the grid services. To see how changes in policies could impact the profitability of the project, a potential benefit analysis for adding the device is undertaken using an existing market structure.…”

Evaluation of different APC operating strategies considering turbine loading and power dynamics for grid support

“…The provision of ancillary services by wind turbines is an increasingly important functionality for a stable and reliable operation of the electric power system (van Kuik et al, 2016). These ancillary services may comprise features like the reaction to frequency deviations for balancing load variations at different timescales (Margaris et al, 2012;Rebello et al, 2020), or supporting black-start of the power system (Shan et al, 2020;Jain et al, 2020). Effectively, these concepts vary the active and reactive power injection to match the demands of the electric grid, and therefore active power control (APC) on a turbine level is involved.…”