A High-Performance Grid-Integrated Wind Energy Conversion System (WECS) for Sustainable Energy Development

Introduction

Recently, all countries worldwide are concerned about the impacts caused by prolonged utilization of fossil fuels in environment. Subsequently, various schemes are initiated for promoting the utilization of clean energy resources. Adoption of these schemes insists the countries to reduce the emissions of below a specific limit. The European Union 2020 suggests that a particular renewable energy quantity has to be integrated with grid. Renewable energy is often viewed as the unavoidable future trend in global electric power development. The proportion of power grid renewable energy generation has shown a steady increase as the cost of renewable energy generation has decreased and power electronics technology has advanced rapidly. These improvements in generation of renewable energy has started replacing thermal power plants and thus emerged as an efficient solution. Among renewable energy resources, wind energy faces a rapid growth and presently contributes a considerable part of the power generation. Due to the nature of wind resource, unsteady patterns generate in the wind power production. Added to intermittency, the patterns of wind output power generates rapid ramps in both negative as well as positive directions. Incorporating these intermittent sources with grid lead to intense dilemmas in grid stability. Apart from the surge in generation of wind power, the stability of grid must be maintained (Jun Hashimoto et al., 1988) (Moghaddam et al., 2019; Sattar et al., 2020).

Figure 1.

The switched reluctance generator (SRG) in wind energy conversion system (WECS)

is widely utilized owing to its advantages like simple design, improved efficiency, absence of windings or magnets in rotor, fault tolerance and robustness (Neto et al., 2018; Bartolo et al., 2017). Hence, heat losses generally occur in stator which in turn provides easy cooling as well as increased speed of operation. Added to this, SRG has captivated the interest of many researchers due to its less repair costs and maintenance (Mendez et al., 2014; Gan et al., 2018; Sikder et al., 2014). The connection of SRG with the utility grid is either in direct manner or in interfaced manner. In direct manner, the voltage source converter (VSC) is exploited for the regulation of DC-bus voltage and the maximum power point tracking is carried out (Rahmanian et al., 2017; Barros et al., 2017; Mossad, 2020). Considering the interfaced manner of connection, a DC-DC converter is generally deployed for enhancing the resultant voltage from SRG thereby generating an optimal performance.