Robust Feedback Control of Power Systems with Solar Plants and Composite Loads

TL;DR

This paper develops advanced robust feedback controllers for power systems with high renewable penetration, improving transient stability and disturbance resilience through simulation-based validation of control strategies.

Contribution

It introduces new control-theoretic wide-area controllers tailored for modern power systems with PV plants and complex loads, enhancing stability and robustness.

Findings

Controllers significantly improve transient stability.

Enhanced disturbance attenuation performance.

Robustness against load and renewable uncertainties.

Abstract

Due to the rapid developments in synchronized measurement technologies, there exist enormous opportunities to attenuate disturbances in future power grids with high penetration of renewables and complex load demands. To that end, this paper investigates the effectiveness of new robust feedback controllers for interconnected power systems with advanced power electronics-based models of photovoltaic (PV) power plants, composite load dynamics, and detailed higher-order synchronous generator models. Specifically, we design new, advanced control-theoretic wide-area controllers to improve the transient stability of nonlinear differential-algebraic models. Thorough simulation studies are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed controllers. Several fundamental questions on the proposed controllers' computational complexity and disturbance attenuation performance are raised and addressed. Simulation results demonstrate that with the proposed controllers as a secondary control layer, the overall transient stability and system robustness against load and renewables disturbances/uncertainties can be significantly improved compared to the state-of-the-art.