Note: This is a virtual presentation. Here is the link for where the presentation will be taking place.
Title: Leveraging Inverter-Interfaced Energy Storage for Frequency Control in Low-Inertia Power Systems
Abstract: The shift from conventional synchronous generation to renewable inverter-interfaced sources has led to a noticeable degradation of frequency dynamics in power systems, mainly due to a loss of inertia. Fortunately, the recent technology advancement and cost reduction in energy storage facilitate the potential for higher renewable energy penetration via inverter-interfaced energy storage. With proper control laws imposed on inverters, the rapid power-frequency response from energy storage contributes to mitigating the degradation. A straightforward choice is to emulate the droop response and/or inertial response of synchronous generators through droop control (DC) or virtual inertia (VI), yet they do not necessarily fully exploit the benefits of inverter-interfaced energy storage. This thesis thus seeks to challenge this naive choice of mimicking synchronous generator characteristics by advocating for a principled control design perspective.
To achieve this goal, we build an analysis framework for quantifying the performance of power systems using signal and system norms, within which we perform a systematic study to evaluate the effect of different control laws on both frequency response metrics and storage economic metrics. More precisely, under a mild yet insightful proportionality assumption, we are able to perform a modal decomposition which allows us to get closed-form expressions or conditions for synchronous frequency, Nadir, rate of change of frequency (RoCoF), synchronization cost, frequency variance, and steady-state effort share. All of them pave the way for a better understanding of the sensitivities of various performance metrics to different control laws.
Our analysis unveils several limitations of traditional control laws, such as the inability of DC to improve the dynamic performance without sacrificing the steady-state performance and the unbounded frequency variance introduced by VI in the presence of frequency measurement noise. Therefore, rather than clinging to the idea of imitating synchronous generator behavior via inverter-interfaced energy storage, we prefer searching for better solutions.
We first propose dynam-i-c Droop control (iDroop)—inspired by the classical lead/lag compensator—which is proved to enjoy many good properties. First of all, the added degrees of freedom in iDroop allow to decouple the dynamic performance improvement from the steady-state performance. In addition, the lead/lag property of iDroop makes it less sensitive to stochastic power fluctuations and frequency measurement noise. Last but not least, iDroop can also be tuned either to achieve the zero synchronization cost or to achieve the Nadir elimination, by which we mean to remove the overshoot in the transient system frequency. Particularly, the Nadir elimination tuning of iDroop exhibits the potential for a balance among various performance metrics in reality. However, iDroop has no control over the RoCoF, which is undesirable in low-inertia power systems for the risk of falsely triggering protection.
We then propose frequency shaping control (FS)—an extension of iDroop—whose most outstanding feature is its ability to shape the system frequency dynamics following a sudden power imbalance into a first-order one with the specified synchronous frequency and RoCoF by adjusting two independent control parameters respectively.
We finally validate theoretical results through extensive numerical experiments performed on a more realistic power system test case that violates the proportionality assumption, which clearly confirms that our proposed control laws outperform the traditional ones in an overall sense.
Committee Members
Enrique Mallada, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Pablo A. Iglesias, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dennice F. Gayme, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Petr Vorobev, Center for Energy Science and Technology, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology