Microgrids are increasingly recognized as a key technology for the integration of distributed energy resources into the power network, allowing local clusters of load and distributed energy resources to operate autonomously. However, microgrid operation brings new challenges, especially in islanded operation as frequency and voltage control are no longer provided by large rotating machines. Instead, the power converters in the microgrid must coordinate to regulate the frequency and voltage and ensure stability. We consider the problem of designing controllers to achieve these objectives. Using passivity theory to derive decentralized stability conditions for the microgrid, we propose a control design method for grid-forming inverters. For the analysis we use higher-order models for the inverters and also advanced dynamic models for the lines with an arbitrarily large number of states. By satisfying the decentralized condition formulated, plug-and-play operation can be achieved with guaranteed stability, and performance can also be improved by incorporating this condition as a constraint in corresponding optimization problems formulated. In addition, our control design can improve the power sharing properties of the microgrid compared to previous non-droop approaches. Finally, realistic simulations confirm that the controller design improves the stability and performance of the power network.
Grid-forming inverter-based autonomous microgrids present new operational challenges as the stabilizing rotational inertia of synchronous machines is absent. The design of efficient control policies for grid-forming inverters is, however, a non-trivial problem where multiple performance objectives need to be satisfied, including voltage/frequency regulation, current limiting capabilities, as well as active power sharing and a scalable operation. We propose in this paper a novel control architecture for frequency and voltage control which allows current limitation via an inner loop, active powe…
This paper presents a new distributed control framework to coordinate inverter-interfaced distributed energy resources (DERs) in island microgrids. We show that under bounded load uncertainties, the proposed control method can steer the microgrid to a desired steady state with synchronized inverter frequency across the network and proportional sharing of both active and reactive powers among the inverters. We also show that such convergence can be achieved while respecting constraints on voltage magnitude and branch angle differences. The controller is robust under various contingency scenario…
A survey on modeling of microgrids - from fundamental physics to phasors and voltage sources
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Tufts University（塔夫茨大学）；Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik komplexer technischer Systeme（马克斯·普朗克复杂技术系统动力学研究所）
Inverter-interfaced microgrids differ from the traditional power systems due to their lack of inertia. Vanishing timescale separation between voltage and frequency dynamics makes it critical that faster-timescale stabilizing control laws also guarantee by-construction the satisfaction of voltage limits during transients. In this article, we apply a barrier functions method to compute distributed active and reactive power setpoint control laws that certify satisfaction of voltage limits during transients. Using sum-of-squares optimization tools, we propose an algorithmic construction of these c…
Inverter-connected resources can improve transient stability in low-inertia grids by injecting active power to minimize system frequency deviations following disturbances. In practice, most generation and load disturbances are step changes and the engineering figure-of-merit is often the peak overshoot in frequency resulting from these step disturbances. In addition, the inverter-connected resources tend to saturate much more easily than conventional synchronous machines. However, despite these challenges, standard controller designs must deal with averaged quantities through $H_2$ or $H_\inft…
Inverter-based microgrids are an important technology for sustainable electrical power systems and typically use droop-controlled grid-forming inverters to interface distributed energy resources to the network and control the voltage and frequency. Ensuring stability of such microgrids is a key issue, which requires the use of appropriate models for analysis and control system design. Full-order detailed models can be more difficult to analyze and increase computational complexity, hence a number of reduced-order models have been proposed in the literature which present various trade-offs betw…
We consider the problem of voltage stability and reactive power balancing in islanded small-scale electrical networks outfitted with DC/AC inverters ("microgrids"). A droop-like voltage feedback controller is proposed which is quadratic in the local voltage magnitude, allowing for the application of circuit-theoretic analysis techniques to the closed-loop system. The operating points of the closed-loop microgrid are in exact correspondence with the solutions of a reduced power flow equation, and we provide explicit solutions and small-signal stability analyses under several static and dynamic …
This paper investigates the performance of a microgrid with droop-controlled inverters in terms of the total power losses incurred in maintaining synchrony under persistent small disturbances. The inverters are modeled with variable frequencies and voltages under droop control. For small fluctuations from a steady state, these transient power losses can be quantified by an input-output H2 norm of a linear system subject to distributed disturbances. We evaluate this H2 norm under the assumption of a dominantly inductive network with identical inverters. The results indicate that while phase syn…
Unlike conventional generators, inverter-based generation do not possess any rotational inertia. While grid-forming inverters can synthesize small (virtual) inertia via advanced feedback control loops, additional control mechanisms are needed to ensure safety and security of the power grid during transients. In this paper, we propose novel real-time safety-constrained feedback controllers ("safety filters") for droop-based (grid-forming) inverters to ensure transient security of the grid. The safety filter acts as a buffer between the network operational layer and the inverter-control layer, a…
This paper investigates transient performance of inverter-based microgrids in terms of the resistive power losses incurred in regulating frequency under persistent stochastic disturbances. We model the inverters as second-order oscillators and compare two algorithms for frequency regulation: the standard frequency droop controller and a distributed proportional-integral (PI) controller. The transient power losses can be quantified using an input-output H2 norm. We show that the distributed PI-controller, which has previously been proposed for secondary frequency control (the elimination of sta…
As modern engineering systems grow in complexity, attitudes toward a modular design approach become increasingly more favorable. A key challenge to a modular design approach is the certification of robust stability under uncertainties in the rest of the network. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying the parametric region, which guarantees stability of the connected module in the robust sense under uncertainties. We derive the conditions under which the robust stability of the connected module is guaranteed for some values of the design parameters, and present a sum-of-squares (…
In this work, we explore a new approach to synchronization of coupled oscillators. In contrast to the celebrated Kuramoto model we do not work in polar coordinates and do not consider oscillations of fixed magnitude. We propose a synchronizing feedback based on relative state information and local measurements that induces consensus-like dynamics. We show that, under a mild stability condition, the combination of the synchronizing feedback with a decentralized magnitude control law renders the oscillators' almost globally asymptotically stable with respect to set-points for the phase shift, fr…
Considering the structure of dc Microgrids (MGs) composed of grid-forming/feeding converters, a hierarchical Plug-and-Play (PnP) voltage/current control architecture for MG clusters is proposed. In the primary level, a PnP voltage/current controller is proposed to achieve simultaneous voltage support and current feeding function according to local references. In addition, stabilizing controller is characterized by explicit inequalities which are only related to local parameters of a MG. In the secondary level, for the system with interconnection of MGs, a leader-based voltage/current distribut…
In this work, we analyze the effect of transmission line dynamics on grid-forming control for inverter-based AC power systems. In particular, we investigate a dispatchable virtual oscillator control (dVOC) strategy that was recently proposed in the literature. When the dynamics of the transmission lines are neglected, i.e., if an algebraic model of the transmission network is used, dVOC ensures almost global asymptotic stability of a network of AC power inverters with respect to a pre-specified solution of the AC power-flow equations. While this approximation is typically justified for convent…
This paper presents an analysis and experimental validation of dispatchable virtual oscillator control (dVOC) for inverter-dominated power systems. dVOC is a promising decentralized control strategy that requires only local measurements to induce grid-forming behavior with programmable droop characteristics. It is dispatchable i.e., the inverters can vary their power generation via user-defined power set-points and guarantees strong stability. To verify its feasibility, a testbed comprising multiple dVOC-programmed inverters with transmission line impedances is designed. With an embedded synch…
