Due to the potential of thermal storage being similar to that of the conventional battery, air conditioning (AC) has gained great popularity for its potential to provide ancillary services and emergency reserves. In order to integrate numerous inverter ACs into secondary frequency control, a hierarchical distributed control framework which incorporates a virtual battery model of inverter AC is developed. A comprehensive derivation of a second-order virtual battery model has been strictly posed to formulate the frequency response characteristics of inverter AC. In the hierarchical control scheme, a modified control performance index is utilized to evaluate the available capacity of traditional regulation generators. A coordinated frequency control strategy is derived to exploit the complementary and advantageous characteristics of regulation generators and aggregated AC. A distributed consensus control strategy is developed to guarantee the fair participation of heterogeneous AC in frequency regulation. The finite-time consensus protocol is introduced to ensure the fast convergence of power tracking and the state-of-charge (SOC) consistency of numerous ACs. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is validated by a variety of illustrative examples.
Experimental Demonstration of Frequency Regulation by Commercial Buildings—Part I: Modeling and Hierarchical Control Design
