Smart load management with energy storage for power quality enhancement in wind-powered oil and gas applications

This paper investigates power quality issues in a wind-powered offshore oil and gas platform operating in island mode. Topics of interest are the negative effects that load and wind power variability have on the electrical system frequency and voltage; and how those influence the gas turbine operation. The authors discuss how smart load management together with energy storage can mitigate those effects, and propose a control algorithm for that. Simulations in MATLAB/Simulink demonstrate that the proposed energy storage controller reduces frequency and voltage variations in a case study. Moreover, the paper presents a methodology to derive a simplified model of the hybrid energy system that reduces simulation time in at least two orders of magnitude. The latter can be a useful tool for optimization algorithms evaluating a huge number of scenarios, especially those dealing with economical dispatch of generators or sizing of energy storage systems.