This paper presents a control method for inverter-interfaced distributed generation (DG) and energy storage systems (ESSs) in an islanded microgrid. The proposed method is focused on secondary control, particularly frequency restoration and maintaining the ESSs’ state of charge (SOC). To recover frequency deviation due to load change, an ESS is used as a droop-controlled grid-forming source. However, the grid-forming ESS cannot manage its own SOC, since it cannot control its own output power; hence, grid-feeding DGs are used to maintain the SOC within a desired range. Management of the SOC, as well as frequency restoration, is conducted by using local controllers without any communication devices, since dependency on communication may deteriorate system reliability in the case of failure. The proposed method for maintaining SOC can be realized by adjusting the system frequency, which is the only value that can be measured locally with almost the same value at every node in a steady state. Frequency restoration can be achieved by a simple ON/OFF scheme of the integral controller with a hysteresis loop to solve problems caused by differences between frequency measurements or set points among DGs.
