Optimal Shunt Reactor Planning for Offshore Wind Farm

Offshore wind farms (OWFs) significantly produce capacitive reactive power through their submarine connection to the main grid. Grid-connected resources must regulate their reactive power output to maintain reliable system operation. Excessive capacitive reactive power can be economically mitigated with the optimal planning of shunt reactors. This paper proposes an optimal shunt reactor planning method using the Equilibrium Optimizer (EO) algorithm. The proposed method is assessed in an actual OWF located on the west coast of Taiwan. The test consists of four cases with different shunt reactor configurations each. The results indicate that the ideal allocation of shunt reactors for the studied system consists of a smaller offshore shunt reactor capacity and a larger onshore shunt reactor capacity, each split into several individual shunt reactors. However, limited space availability and weight capacity on the OWF and the complexity of controlling too many shunt reactors may warrant less ideal allocation of shunt reactors. Furthermore, the solutions from the proposed EO-based method are superior to three other metaheuristic algorithms and one traditional solver.