Abstract As the capacity of wind turbines has increased, the loads on crucial components such as a gearbox, a generator, and blades are significantly increasing. An intelligent online monitoring system is indispensable to protect the excessive load on core components and manage a wind farm efficiently. In order to verify new online monitoring and diagnostic methods for such a monitoring system in advance, a wind turbine simulator is essential. For this purpose, we developed a simulator that has similar dynamics to an actual 3 MW wind turbine, and is thereby able to acquire a state of operation that closely resembles that of the 3 MW wind turbine under a variety of wind conditions. This paper describes the implementation of a torque and a collective pitch controller, which is used for a new type of simulator with the intention of exploiting online monitoring and diagnostic methods. The torque and the collective pitch controllers were developed to facilitate variable speed-variable pitch control strategies in the wind turbine simulator. Experiments demonstrated that three control regions were successfully deployed on the simulator, and thereby the simulator was operated at all control regions in a stable and accurate manner. Moreover, the strain and vibration measured from the blade and the gearbox showed different trends at three control regions. Therefore, a new type of simulator is an effective means to develop diagnostic and prognostic algorithms as well as online monitoring methods reflecting the dependency of dynamic characteristics on the control regions.