Smart grid technology for a community-owned wind farm

Power and automation technology group ABB’s recently launched smart grid technology, STATCOM PCS 100, was used to connect the renewable energy generated by the Hepburn Wind farm into the electricity grid.

Hepburn Wind is Australia’s first community-owned wind farm and is located at Leonards Hill, 10 kilometres south of Daylesford in central Victoria. The facility, which consists of two REpower MM82 2.05 MW (megawatt) wind turbines, provides a total capacity of 4 MW of power and will produce enough electricity for 2300 homes. This provides enough renewable electricity for almost all of the households in Daylesford and Hepburn Springs. “By introducing the new STATCOM PCS 100 product into the market, ABB is now in the unique position of being able to provide scalability with anything from 100 KVAr to several megavar (MVAr). We believe this is a significant competitive advantage over other similar solutions that are limited by fixed sizing,” said Peter Duncan, local business manager for ABB’s Power Electronics Systems.

The STATCOM has a continuous rating of ±1.1 MVAr reactive power and it also provides a degree of active harmonic filtration. It is connected at 22 kV in the wind farm with the aim of enabling the wind engineering consultants, Consolidated Power Projects, to fulfil the network connection agreement. The grid code demands that power plants of any kind support the electricity network throughout their operation. Despite using some of the best turbine technology available, additional equipment like a STATCOM was needed due to the particularly difficult network conditions.

The most advanced solution to compensate the reactive power is to use a voltage-controlled power converter with fast semiconductor switches, which can provide fast and variable reactive power to the grid. The STATCOM converter monitors the line current and voltage in order to promptly provide the capacitive or inductive reactive power. The PCS 100 STATCOM solution is a modular, redundant, air-cooled, low-voltage converter mounted inside a relocatable shipping container, allowing a fast, easy and cost-efficient installation. The cost benefits include potential savings on land usage due to the small footprint, along with savings on civil works as the equipment is delivered to the site as a pretested complete solution. “This is a groundbreaking order for ABB in Australia and the direct result of our desire to develop a new modular and scalable smart grid solution to support the renewable energy and electricity sector in Australia,” Duncan said.