Currently, both the permanent magnet synchronous generators and the electrically excited synchronous generator are used in the direct-drive wind turbine technology to produce electrical energy. Aiming at the high cost of permanent magnets, the commercial availability, mainly in African, and the difficulty of the magnetic field weakening operation of the PMSG machine, the work studied a novel design of a direct-drive H-Darrieus wind turbine (H-DWT) based on doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) using MATLAB/Simulink software. The stator topology is connected directly to the grid while the rotor is connected to grid with back to back converters. The study includes the sizing, modeling, and control of the proposed system. A sliding mode control (SMC) approach is selected in order to achieve robust control of active/reactive power injected into the grid. The real wind speed spanning a period of one year of the province of Adrar city located in the south of Algeria is used to test the complete system. The simulation results illustrate the operating efficiency of a DFIG and the performance of the SMC method in stator powers tracking in direct-drive wind energy conversion systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.