Enhanced Virtual Inertia Control for Microgrid Frequency Regulation

Due to a number of financial and operational difficulties that have recently been faced by power plants, the electricity industry is exploring a concept as the smart grid to address the problems in the future.

Smart grids are capable of improving the operation of its components by reducing power costs, reducing additional charges, ensuring maintenance, saving costs of electricity generation, meeting demand, and helping to protect the environment.

Smart grid energy systems have been developed constantly in order to be able to integrate renewable energy resources, energy storage systems, diesel generators, loads, control systems, etc., which are called microgrids or hybrid power systems, where energy management and planning are of critical importance. Due to the environmental issues, energy crisis, and economic growth, the utilization of renewable energy sources (RESs) towards high penetration in our society is seriously inevitable.

The utilization of inverters/converters will significantly reduce the input of the power system.

Moreover, low system inertia issue is one of the major restrictions to integrate RESs, which are clean, cheap, and sustainable to all communities. Accordingly, renewable power systems (RPSs) have become more sensitive to the system insecure than traditional power systems because of the following reasons; First, RPSs reduce the overall inertia of the power system that results from replacing the conventional generators, e.g., synchronous generators with RESs. The second reason is the decoupling of the RESs from the Alternating Current (AC) grid via power converters. Thus, maintaining the dynamic security of RPSs is the key challenge for integrating more RESs.