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Recent research on wind-farm control methods has focused until now on maximising the efficiency and durability of farm operations, as verified for a normalised electrical layout. However, with the increase of turbine size and capacity, it is necessary to develop modifications of the farm management plan that can support the increasing demands of the wind-turbine industry. Here the authors propose a modification that focuses on a proportional reactive power-dispatch method that is applied to radial offshore farm networks. They improve a previously developed method of proportionally distributing reactive power commands by considering the actual configuration of an offshore platform. To confirm the applicability of this method in transient state, they examine case studies using a time-varying signal for a reactive power reference under fluctuating wind. Electromagnetic transients using DC software tools are used to estimate the electrical loss and verify the efficiency of this strategy.

The recent development of a number of advanced wind farm (WF) operation strategies, using designed verification studies, has resulted in various operational and economic improvements. These applications focused on stabilised conditions to confirm the improved effect derived from a maximum power extraction condition. In the case of large-scale WFs, however, a physical area with realistic environmental variations should be considered in order to conduct applicable case studies. In this study, the authors propose a modified reactive power allocation strategy, based on proportional techniques, with the system components of a WF structure for utilisation under a variety of practical situations. The proposed method introduces a modified loss prediction model, which takes the resistive components of the wind turbine into consideration. Each analysis is conducted to confirm the feasibility of active reference assignment in terms of loss reduction and flexibility. The simulations are based on electromagnetic transients using DC software tools to perform electrical loss estimation, in order to verify the effectiveness of this strategy.