Design of Wind Turbine Controllers

Owing to concern over the environment, there is much interest in renewable sources of energy, one of the most promising of which is wind power. Wind power is not yet a mature technology and one of the issues to be resolved is the most effective manner in which to regulate the wind turbines are posed by the different wind turbine configurations. A variety of control design tasks with differing objectives. The plant may be SISO or MIMO; it may be unstable and/or non-minimum phase; it may be essentially linear or strongly nonlinear depending on the machine's configuration. The purpose of this paper is to discuss controller design for horizontal axis, grid-connected, medium to large scale wind turbines. The design is invariably nonlinear in order to accomodate the full operating range and the nonlinearities in the plant, actuation system, and control objectives. Both constant speed and variable speed machines are discussed.