Wide Area Control of Distributed Resources through 5G Communication to Provide Frequency Support

Towards the green transition of modern power systems, a massive deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs) based on renewable sources is required. These DERs are grid integrated through power electronics converters which reduce the commitment of synchronous generators and as a result, the overall inertia of the system. Maintaining the frequency stability in such low-inertia power systems is a crucial aspect for the system operators; therefore, local control schemes are integrated with conventional generators and DERs to ensure fast reaction in case of frequency disturbances so as to preserve system stability. Existing practices for maintaining the frequency stability rely on the response of a local governor controller integrated with the synchronous generators. Some new approaches introduce frequency support services by DERs, by considering the droop control and virtual inertia concept within the inverter local controller. In another approach, wide area control schemes can also be utilized to further enhance the system stability. Such a wide area control scheme is introduced in this work to coordinate the operation of DERs through 5G communication for enabling fast frequency support services. Due to the fast dynamics of a power system, a reliable and high-speed communication is particularly important for the deployment of the proposed method. Therefore, an experimental hardware in the loop setup has been developed to investigate how the communication performance can affect the stability of the power system. Moreover, a benchmarking is implemented to evaluate the frequency stability when local controllers are providing support and when the proposed wide area controller is applied under a different communication infrastructure. Experimental results demonstrate that when a reliable 5G network is used, then a significant stability improvement can be achieved by the proposed wide area controller.