A Plug and Play Distributed Secondary Controller for Microgrids with Grid-Forming Inverters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed secondary control method for microgrids with grid-forming inverters, enabling decentralized voltage regulation and reactive power sharing, validated through hardware-in-the-loop experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed control approach based on optimization for microgrids with GFM inverters, with proven convergence and practical validation.

Findings

Effective voltage regulation achieved

Reactive power sharing demonstrated

Controller validated through hardware-in-the-loop experiments

Abstract

A distributed controller for secondary control problems in microgrids with grid-forming (GFM) inverter-based resources (IBRs) is developed. The controller is based on distributed optimization and is synthesized and implemented distributively enabling each GFM IBR to utilize decentralized measurements and the neighborhood information in the communication network. We present a convergence analysis establishing voltage regulation and reactive power sharing properties. A controller-hardware-in-the-loop experiment is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller. The experimental results corroborate the efficacy of the proposed distributed controller for secondary control.