Distributed optimal active and reactive power control for wind farms based on ADMM

In this paper, a distributed optimal active and reactive power control (DARPC) strategy based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed for wind farms (WFs). The WFs operate in a distributed manner to minimize the network power loss, voltage deviations of buses from the rated voltage, and active power output deviations of WTs from their proportional distribution (PD)-based power reference. An optimization problem is formulated as a quadratic programming (QP) problem by using the linearized DistFlow model. The ADMM-based solution is used to decompose the centralized optimization problem to several subproblems which are solved in individual local controllers with exchanged information from their practical neighbor controllers. Compared with existing distributed/hierarchical optimal control, the impacts of the active power injection from the WTs are taken into consideration and optimized while meeting the dispatch command from the transmission system operator (TSO). The ADMM-based distributed solution eliminates the requirement of a central unit. Compared with conventional centralized optimal control, the scalability of the WFs is improved. A WF consisting of 20 WTs is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to test the control effectiveness of the proposed DARPC strategy.