A reactive power compensation strategy for offshore wind farms to achieve grid code capabilities

The focus of the proposed work is to evaluate the optimal reactive power compensation strategy to comply with the reactive power integration requirements, by minimising the reactive power efforts by available resources along with the sizing of a dedicated compensation device in the presence of a detailed representation of the network modelled through full AC load flow constraints. The proposed procedure is applied to an offshore wind farm connected to the Italian transmission grid (400 kV) via a high voltage AC underground cable link. The results highlight that a remarkable inductive reactive compensation is required to accomplish the TSO capabilities, and that a considerable contribution to reactive power compensation is given by wind turbine regulation, whereas on-load tap changer has pivotal role for operating in feasible voltage ranges.