Extended operation control to integrate german (offshore) wind farms

In a German research and development project a new control unit for system operators, the Wind Farm Cluster-Management (WCM) has been developed. It is able to co-ordinate the geographical distributed wind farms and represent them as one wind power plant for the system operators purposes. The pooling of several large (off-shore-) wind farms to clusters in Gigawatt (GW) range will make new options feasible for an optimised integration of intermittent generation into power supply systems. The concept has been developed into a software tool, which can be installed at the Transmission System Operators grid control center. The WCM will be tested and verified with onshore wind farms in a demonstration phase.