AbstractThe cost of energy should be minimised to increase market penetration of wind energy conversion systems. The existing wind farm control strategies are not helpful since they speed up the damage in upstream wind turbines. Therefore, a control strategy is proposed to maximise the energy yield while equalising lifetime of one of the most fragile sub‐system of the wind turbines. The DC‐link capacitor bank of the back‐to‐back converters is considered to this end. The proposed control strategy can be directly applied in systems based on type 4 wind turbines with full power converters. This exposition reveals the formulation of the control strategy by analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the existing strategies based on the maximum power output. The lifetime‐based control strategy is extended to formulate a multi‐stage reactive power dispatch method with the help of a total energy‐based strategy. The effectiveness of all control strategies is validated using the model‐based simulations.