Decentralized Model-Predictive Control of a Coupled Wind Turbine and Diesel Engine Generator System

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It is highly critical that renewable energy-based power generation units provide continuous and high-quality electricity. This requirement is even more pronounced in standalone wind–diesel systems where the wind power is not always constant or available. Moreover, it is desired that the extracted power be maximized in such a way that less fuel is consumed from the diesel engine. This paper proposes a novel method to design decentralized model-predictive controllers to control the frequency and power of a single standalone generation system, which consists of a wind turbine subsystem mechanically coupled with a diesel engine generator subsystem. Two decentralized model-predictive controllers are designed to regulate the frequency and active power, while the mechanical coupling between the two subsystems is considered, and no communication links exist between the two controllers. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized controllers outperform the benchmark decentralized linear-quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controllers in terms of eliminating the disturbances from the wind and load power changes. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the proposed control strategy has an acceptable robust performance against the concurrent variations in all parameters of the system as compared to the LQG controllers.