Abstract: In order to facilitate the participation of wind turbines in primary frequency regulation, an adaptive control method for primary frequency regulation of wind turbines based on the rate of change of frequency（ROCOF） is proposed. The ROCOF is divided into three intervals; the variable droop integrated inertial control is adopted in the small and medium ROCOF value ranges;and the improved short-term power over-generation control is adopted in the large value range. In the improved short-term power over-generation control, a power shaping function is designed to adjust the over-generation power of wind turbines, which can well adapt to different ROCOF values. A four-unit two-area model with doubly-fed wind turbines is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. In different disturbance scenarios, the ROCOF-based adaptive control method is compared with the adaptive inertial control scheme, and the results show that the frequency regulation performance of the former is better than that of the latter.