Communication delay estimation for wind power plant controllers based on PMU measurements

The communication control delay between the inverters and the power plant controller can be caused by several factors related to the communication link between them. Under undesirable conditions, high delay values can produce oscillations in the wind power plant that can affect the rest of the power system. In this work, we present a new robust methodology for wind turbines to estimate the value of the communication control delay using phasor measurement unit (PMU) data. Several scenarios are considered where external faults are simulated and the performance of the algorithm is evaluated based on dynamic state estimation of the mathematical model of the wind turbine. In this paper, we have shown that the characterization of the delay can be performed offering the transmission system operator an online tool to identify the most suited communication delay for the plant controller models used in dynamic studies.