Interactions Between Wind Turbines and Synchronous Condensers Equipped with Flywheels

Synchronous condensers integrated with a flywheel can be used to enhance system inertia in addition to providing voltage and reactive power support. The added flywheel introduces torsional modes that may interact with the rest of the system in ways like what has been studied for synchronous generators. This paper shows how such interactions may play out in wind power systems. The focus will be 1) torque amplification when a torsional mode is excited by an existing electrical resonance and 2) torsional control interaction when the torsional mode creates a variation in the synchronous condenser’s impedance and forms an unstable oscillation with a nearby wind turbine. Modeling and analysis are performed in the frequency-domain using impedance-based methods and verified by EMT simulation.