Citation: Nomandela, S.; Mnguni, M.E.S.; Raji, A.K. Modeling and Simulation of a Large-Scale Wind Power Plant Considering Grid Code Requirements. Energies 2023, 16, 2897. https://doi.org/10.3390/en16062897 Academic Editor: Frede Blaabjerg Received: 5 March 2023 Revised: 15 March 2023 Accepted: 17 March 2023 Published: 21 March 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). energies Article Modeling and Simulation of a Large-Scale Wind Power Plant Considering Grid Code Requirements Sinawo Nomandela * , Mkhululi E. S. Mnguni and Atanda K. Raji Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, P.O. Box 1906 Bellville, Cape Town 7353, South Africa; mngunim@cput.ac.za (M.E.S.M.); rajia@cput.ac.za (A.K.R.) * Correspondence: nomandelas@cput.ac.za Abstract: The load demand to a power grid, as well as the interest in clean and low-cost energy resources, has led to the high integration of wind power plants into power system grids. There are grid code standards that are set for the design and integration of these wind power plants. These codes often look at the design operation of the wind power plant in islanded mode, where possible analysis of the most sensitive power system quantities such as voltage, frequency, reactive power, etc. is carried out. Therefore, in this study, attention was paid to the application of these codes to keep the design and integration of wind power plants well standardized as much as possible. The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the literature and theory about the design of wind turbine generators and model and simulate a large-scale wind power plant. The modeling was successfully carried out on RSCAD, and the results obtained show that the wind power plant can be further used for other studies such as voltage stability improvement in power grids. Keywords: modeling; wind turbine (WT); wind turbine generator unit (WTGU); wind power plant (WPP); wind turbine power coefficient 1. Introduction Integration of wind power plants (WPPs) is increasing in the last few decades. As a result, the installed capacity in the past ten years has increased from 180 GW to 732 GW in the 2010–2020 period [1,2]. This clearly shows that WPPs will have a higher share of power in modern power grids in the future. The use of large-scale WPPs simulations in the analysis of power system problems requires detailed modeling of all components involved in completing a WPP starting from each wind turbine generator unit (WTGU) up to the transmission line system connecting the entire system into the power grid [3]. Moreover, the renewable energy grid code specifications must be followed when modeling such a system so that the system can be industry relevant [4]. WPPs can be operated either in a grid-connected mode or a standalone mode. Even if the WPP is meant for grid integration, the testing of verification of grid code specifications must be carried out in a standalone mode of operation. However, the research that has been carried out rarely considers the WPPs in an islanded mode of operation. In addition, some of the published work makes use of a single wind turbine generator unit (WTGU) and assumes it is a complete WPP (as it is supposed to consider the modeling of multiple WTGUs to accommodate WPP dynamics at large). Most importantly for scholarly benefits, little work has been carried out covering the theory about wind turbine generator (WTG) operation from the power produced by wind up to the output electrical power. A study of a WPP integration into a weak distribution network is proposed in [4]. Their WPP model has 6 MW single WTGs large enough to represent a reasonable large-scale WPP. A 9 MW single WTG for the integration into the grid through the static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is modeled in [5]. It is understood that the computation of each component consumes time. In a wind power plant area, the wind speed is not the same. This means that the power produced Energies 2023, 16, 2897. https://doi.org/10.3390/en16062897 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies