Black Start Restoration of Islanded Droop-Controlled Microgrids.

The electricity grid faces the possibility of outages due to extreme weather events, cyber-attack, and unexpected events. When these unwanted events occur, it is desired that electricity be restored as soon as possible to meet the power demands of critical loads. The microgrid approach to power restoration holds a lot of promise, since microgrids can operate in island mode. This paper presents a novel sequential restoration methodology for microgrid black start. The microgrid architecture considered is assumed to be operating in multi-master mode. The master distributed generators (DGs) are coordinated to operate together through droop control. Several operational constraints are formulated and linearized to realize a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem. The method is studied on an islanded microgrid based on a modified IEEE 13 node test feeder. Detailed transient simulation in PSCAD was used to verify the accuracy of the restoration methodology. The developed restoration method can maximize the energy restored while ensuring good voltage and frequency regulation, and ensure that power scheduling mismatch is shared in the desired proportion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]