Converters for the Grid Integration of Wind Farms (Invited Paper)

Wind power is the most dominant renewable source and the global wind power capacity, both on shore and off shore are rapidly increasing. The United Kingdom is leading the use of off shore wind energy and has the largest off shore wind farm in the world. Power electronics is essential for the harnessing of wind energy for use by the consumers. Power electronic converters required are line commutated thyristor converters, two level and multilevel voltage source converters including energy diverting converters for facilitating fault ride through and reactive power compensators. With the advent of DC grids DC-DC converters are required for interfacing different voltage levels and novel designs are required. All these converters require either series connection or modularization of Thyristors and IGBTS with associated voltage equalization networks.