Voltage stability improvement of an Egyptian power grid-based wind energy system using STATCOM

The increase in electricity demand places its focus on renewable energies as sustainable energy resources. Wind energy is one of the most important green energy sources. The doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind farm has now gained prominence due to its many advantages, such as variable speed operation and autonomous control of active and reactive power. When the DFIG stator windings are directly connected to the power grid, when a grid fault occurs, some unwanted high current may be produced in the rotor windings, and the protection system will prevent the rotor side converter (RSC) from operating. Therefore, voltage stability is a significant factor in maintaining the DFIG-based wind farm in operation during grid faults and disturbances. This paper applies a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) to restore the voltage levels of the Egyptian power grid connected to Al Zafarana-5th stage wind farm, which is made of 100 Gamesa G52/850 kW DFIG machines. In this paper, the STATCOM is controlled by a proportional integral (PI) and is compared with a STATCOM controlled by fuzzy logic control (FLC). For simulation, the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment is used. Moreover, the simulation results show that STATCOM devices with fuzzy logic controllers improve the effects of grid faults and disturbances such as a single line to ground fault, a line to line fault, voltage sag, and voltage swell as compared with STATCOM with PI controllers. Also, STATCOM devices based on FLC improve the stability and power quality of the system and the power system restoration procedures for the existing and future-planned wind farms.