Unified Energy Function Tailored to Inverter-Based Resources with PI Controllers for Transient Stability Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new energy function tailored for inverter-based resources with PI controllers, improving transient stability analysis and region of attraction estimation in power systems.

Contribution

A novel energy function explicitly designed for PI-controlled inverter resources, applicable to various nonlinear systems, enhancing stability analysis accuracy.

Findings

The new energy function provides less conservative ROA estimates.

Hardware-in-the-loop experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) has fundamentally altered the transient stability characteristics of modern power systems. IBRs typically rely on proportional--integral (PI) controllers for synchronization and regulation, resulting in nonlinear swing equations that differ significantly from those of synchronous generators (SGs) and exhibit state-dependent damping. Consequently, although the classical energy function is often adopted in IBR analysis by analogy with SGs, it cannot be directly applied to IBRs with PI controller. A new energy function explicitly tailored to PI controller is proposed in this letter. It admits a unified form and can be applied to a class of nonlinear systems with PI controllers. Two representative cases are considered, including a grid-following (GFL) inverter and a DC-voltage-controlled grid-forming (GFM) inverter, demonstrating less conservative and more effective estimation of the region of attraction (ROA). All findings are verified through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments.