Joint Frequency Regulation and Economic Dispatch Using Limited Communication

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized control scheme for power grid frequency regulation and economic dispatch that achieves near-optimal performance without communication, analyzing the tradeoffs and importance of key communication links.

Contribution

It introduces a communication-free decentralized control method for joint frequency regulation and economic dispatch with quantifiable optimality gap.

Findings

Near-optimal economic dispatch achieved without communication.

Tradeoff between cost and convergence time analyzed.

Key communication links identified as critical for performance.

Abstract

We study the performance of a decentralized integral control scheme for joint power grid frequency regulation and economic dispatch. We show that by properly designing the controller gains, after a power flow perturbation, the control achieves near-optimal economic dispatch while recovering the nominal frequency, without requiring any communication. We quantify the gap between the controllable power generation cost under the decentralized control scheme and the optimal cost, based on the DC power flow model. Moreover, we study the tradeoff between the cost and the convergence time, by adjusting parameters of the control scheme. Communication between generators reduces the convergence time. We identify key communication links whose failures have more significant impacts on the performance of a distributed power grid control scheme that requires information exchange between neighbors.