Comparative Study of Data-driven Area Inertia Estimation Approaches on WECC Power Systems

TL;DR

This paper compares different data-driven methods for estimating system inertia in large-scale power grids, finding that system identification approaches are more robust and accurate, which is crucial for maintaining frequency stability amid increasing inverter-based resources.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of inertia estimation techniques applied to the WECC power system, highlighting the superior performance of system identification methods.

Findings

System identification-based approach is more robust.

System identification approach has higher accuracy.

Methods are evaluated on large-scale WECC system.

Abstract

With the increasing integration of inverter-based resources into the power grid, there has been a notable reduction in system inertia, potentially compromising frequency stability. To assess the suitability of existing area inertia estimation techniques for real-world power systems, this paper presents a rigorous comparative analysis of system identification, measurement reconstruction, and electromechanical oscillation-based area inertia estimation methodologies, specifically applied to the large-scale and multi-area WECC 240-bus power system. Comprehensive results show that the system identification-based approach exhibits superior robustness and accuracy relative to its counterparts.