JOINT WORKING GROUP ON FAULT CURRENT

CONTRIBUTIONS FROM WIND PLANTS

MINUTES OF THE MEETING HELD IN CALGARY ON TUESDAY

JULY 28, 8AM 10AM
CTCC NORTH TELUS 110
CALGARY, ALBERTA

LEADERS OF THIS JOINT WORKING GROUP

Transmission and Distribution Committee (T&DC): Reigh Walling, Chair
Electric Machinery Committee (EMC): Ron Harley, Chair
Power System Relaying Committee (PSRC) C17: Dean Miller, Chair
Gene Henneberg, Vice Chair

Established: July 2008

Output: Report
Assignment: To characterize and quantify short circuit current contributions to faults
from wind plants for the purposes of protective relaying and equipment
rating, and to develop modeling and calculation guidelines for the same.
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CALGARY MEETING CHAIRED BY RON HARLEY

1. Present: Chairs Reigh Walling and Ron Harley plus 17 attendees.

2. Apologies: Dean Miller and Travis Smith.
3. Everyone introduced themselves.
4. The January meeting minutes were read and approved without any changes.

NEW BUSINESS
5. Jorge Martinez Garcia from VESTAS discussed the VESTAS asynchronous doubly
fed induction generators (DFIG), the asynchronous generators with rotor resistances,
and other variations of the doubly fed induction generators. Jorge showed time
domain waveforms of fault currents that had different shapes to what protection
engineers were used to and had expected. A lively discussion ensued. People
requested copies of his presentation but he had to get approval from VESTAS before
this could be publicly released.
6. Travis Smith from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) could not attend but Russ
Patterson from TVIG kindly agreed to present the slides prepared by Travis on the
five main large scale wind turbine types and the need for protection based short
circuit models for these turbine/generator types.
7. Charles Henville presented the document he wrote and circulated for requesting data
for fault analysis for individual wind plants and the feed back he received from the
working group members on this document. His document laid out the present usage
 of models like voltage behind sub transient reactance or voltage behind transient
reactance, or negative and zero sequence models. A copy of his document and the
comments appear as an attachment. There was not sufficient time to discuss this
document fully. More discussion is needed at the next meeting.
8. Based on the all the discussions it became clear that for any generator that contains a
power electronic converter,
at present wind generator manufacturers use accurate transient models to compute
the instantaneous current waveforms in the time domain following various
balanced and unbalanced faults at the point of connection to the utility;
there do not exist traditional simple RMS models of voltage behind sub transient
reactance or voltage behind transient reactance, or negative and zero sequence
models, that the utility protection engineers require at present to use in their
traditional software packages like CAPE for example. Research is needed before
it will be possible to cross the gap between transient analysis methods and
traditional methods.
9. The meeting agreed that it should focus its near term attention on the DFIG systems.
Persons should be invited to participate and lead this effort. There was discussion
whether a formal Task Force should be formed to focus on the DFIG machine, but
there was not sufficient time to discuss this more fully. More discussion is needed at
the next meeting.
10. The meeting agreed to recommend that a panel session be planned for the next PES
general meeting in July 2010 on Fault current contributions from wind plants. This
was approved at the Electric Machines Committee the following day.
11. The next Joint Working Group meeting will be during the PSRC meeting in
Arlington, Texas, September 14 -17, 2009.

ACTION ITEMS
(a) Possible measurements from actual wind turbines to validate the transient
models being used.
(b) Has approval by VESTAS been granted for distribution of Jorge Martinez
Gracias presentation?.
(c) The document from Charles Henville together with comments needs more
discussion.
(d) A group of persons has to be formed to investigate the problem in item 9
above, and should a Task Force be formed for this purpose with someone
identified as its Chair? A Task Force needs a scope of work.
(e) Suitable panel members have to identified for item 10 above.