A brushless doubly-fed reluctance generator has been seen by research communities as a potential solution to higher operation and maintenance costs associated with the compromised reliability of brush compartment of conventional doubly-fed induction generators, while offering comparable performance and similar cost benefits of using a partially-rated power electronic converter in wind power applications. A new flux vector oriented encoder-less scheme for speed and inherently decoupled torque and reactive power control has been proposed and successfully experimentally verified on a small machine prototype by emulating the typical torque-speed operating characteristics of ordinary horizontal-axis wind turbines. The obtained test results have clearly indicated the excellent controller response and disturbance rejection abilities over the entire speed range of interest. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.