Candidate: Baheej Alghamdi
Title: Frequency and Voltage Control of a Grid of Microgrids
Date: March 2, 2021
Time: 3:30 PM
Place: REMOTE ATTENDANCE
Supervisor(s): Canizares, Claudio
Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in recent years has resulted in significant technical challenges for power system operators and planners, mainly due to the particular characteristics of some of these systems that are interfaced with converters that alter the dynamic behavior of typically power systems. To accommodate the increasing penetration of DERs in power systems, microgrids have been formed to facilitate their integration. The operation of these microgrids could be further enhanced by interconnecting them to satisfy the overall system demand, and improve their stability if suitable control schemes are implemented. The control of microgrids has been extensively studied; however, coordinated operation, dynamics, and control of a grid that includes interconnected microgrids have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, and thus this is the focus of this thesis.
In the first stage of the thesis, a new microgrid interface based on Virtual Synchronous Generators (VSGs) is proposed to control the power exchange of interconnected ac and dc microgrids, and provide frequency support, voltage regulation, and virtual inertia for individual microgrids and the host grid as required, to improve both frequency and voltage dynamics for the overall system. Thus, a hierarchical distributed control technique is proposed, where the primary control of interfacing VSGs provides adaptive inertia for the ac systems, while a secondary distributed control of the system regulates the frequency and the voltages of the host grid and the interconnected microgrids, based on a consensus technique with limited information about the overall system. The proposed controller shares the total system load among the grid and microgrids, while minimizing the overall frequency and voltage deviations in all interconnected systems. The proposed interface and the controller are implemented, tested, and validated in detailed simulations for a grid-of-microgrids system.