Our paper on Dynamic Droop Control in Low-inertia Power Systems [1] has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control!
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Y. Jiang, R. Pates, and E. Mallada, “Dynamic Droop Control in Low Inertia Power Systems,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 66, iss. 8, pp. 3518-3533, 2021. [Bibtex] [Abstract] [Download PDF]
A widely embraced approach to mitigate the dynamic degradation in low-inertia power systems is to mimic generation response using grid-connected inverters to restore the grid’s stiffness. In this paper, we seek to challenge this approach and advocate for a principled design based on a systematic analysis of the performance trade-offs of inverterbased frequency control. With this aim, we perform a qualitative and quantitative study comparing the effect of conventional control strategies –droop control (DC) and virtual inertia (VI)– on several performance metrics induced by L2 and Lā signal norms. By extending a recently proposed modal decomposition method, we capture the effect of step and stochastic power disturbances, and frequency measurement noise, on the overall transient and steady-state behavior of the system. Our analysis unveils several limitations of these solutions, such as the inability of DC to improve dynamic frequency response without increasing steady-state control effort, or the large frequency variance that VI introduces in the presence of measurement noise. We further propose a novel dynam-i-c Droop controller (iDroop) that overcomes the limitations of DC and VI. More precisely, we show that iDroop can be tuned to achieve high noise rejection, fast system-wide synchronization, or frequency overshoot (Nadir) elimination without affecting the steady-state control effort share, and propose a tuning recommendation that strikes a balance among these objectives. Extensive numerical experimentation shows that the proposed tuning is effective even when our proportionality assumptions are not valid, and that the particular tuning used for Nadir elimination strikes a good trade-off among various performance metrics.
@article{jpm2021tac,
abstract = {A widely embraced approach to mitigate the dynamic degradation in low-inertia power systems is to mimic generation response using grid-connected inverters to restore
the grid's stiffness. In this paper, we seek to challenge this approach and advocate for a principled design based on a systematic analysis of the performance trade-offs of inverterbased frequency control. With this aim, we perform a qualitative
and quantitative study comparing the effect of conventional
control strategies --droop control (DC) and virtual inertia (VI)--
on several performance metrics induced by L2 and Lā signal
norms. By extending a recently proposed modal decomposition
method, we capture the effect of step and stochastic power
disturbances, and frequency measurement noise, on the overall
transient and steady-state behavior of the system. Our analysis
unveils several limitations of these solutions, such as the inability of DC to improve dynamic frequency response without
increasing steady-state control effort, or the large frequency
variance that VI introduces in the presence of measurement
noise. We further propose a novel dynam-i-c Droop controller
(iDroop) that overcomes the limitations of DC and VI. More
precisely, we show that iDroop can be tuned to achieve high
noise rejection, fast system-wide synchronization, or frequency
overshoot (Nadir) elimination without affecting the steady-state
control effort share, and propose a tuning recommendation that
strikes a balance among these objectives. Extensive numerical
experimentation shows that the proposed tuning is effective even
when our proportionality assumptions are not valid, and that
the particular tuning used for Nadir elimination strikes a good
trade-off among various performance metrics.},
author = {Jiang, Yan and Pates, Richard and Mallada, Enrique},
doi = {10.1109/TAC.2020.3034198},
grants = {ENERGISE-DE-EE0008006, EPCN-1711188,AMPS-1736448, CPS-1544771, CAREER-1752362, AMPS-1736448, ARO-W911NF-17-1-0092},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control},
month = {8},
number = {8},
pages = {3518-3533},
record = {available online Nov. 2020, accepted Aug. 2020, revised Mar. 2020, submitted Aug. 2019},
title = {Dynamic Droop Control in Low Inertia Power Systems},
url = {https://mallada.ece.jhu.edu/pubs/2021-TAC-JPM.pdf},
volume = {66},
year = {2021}
}