A Cooperative Control Scheme for AC/DC Hybrid Autonomous Microgrids

The AC/DC hybrid microgrid (MG) has been widely promoted due to its high flexibility. The capability to operate in islanding mode is an appealing advantage of the MG, and also sets higher requirements for its control system. A droop control strategy is proposed on account of its distinguishing feature of automatic power sharing between distributed generations (DGs), but it introduces some drawbacks. Therefore, distributed cooperative secondary control is introduced as an improvement. In order to optimize the active power sharing in AC/DC hybrid microgrids, a number of cooperative control strategies have been proposed. However, most studies of AC/DC hybrid microgrids have mainly focused on the control of the bidirectional converter, ignoring the effects of secondary control within subnets, which may make a difference to the droop characteristic. This paper extends the cooperative control to AC/DC hybrid microgrids based on normalizing and synthesizing the droop equations, and proposes a global cooperative control scheme for AC/DC autonomous hybrid microgrids, realizing voltage restoration within AC and DC subnets as well as accurate global power sharing. Ultimately, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control scheme has a favorable performance in the test AC/DC hybrid system.

A Novel Autonomous Current-Sharing Control Strategy for Multiple Paralleled DC–DC Converters in Islanded DC Microgrid

Due to the existence of line impedances and low-bandwidth communication, the traditional peer-to-peer control method based on droop control has difficult meeting the requirements of current sharing and voltage stability in islanded DC microgrids at the same time. In this paper, a novel current-sharing control strategy based on injected small ac voltage with low frequency and low amplitude is proposed for multiple paralleled DC–DC converters. The small ac voltage is superimposed onto the output voltage of each converter. Then, the reactive circulating power is generated and used to regulate the output DC voltage of each converter. Under the droop characteristic between the injected frequency and output DC current, a feedback mechanism is generated to realize the accurate current sharing. On this basis, a reactive power-voltage limiter link and virtual negative impedance are added. Under the interaction of the two links, the bus voltage drop caused by line impedances can be almost completely eliminated. This method does not need any communication or to change the hardware structure. The controller design process is presented in detail along with a system stability analysis. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy are validated by the results obtained from simulations and experiments.

Comparative Assessment of Priority Listing and Mixed Integer Linear Programming Unit Commitment Methods for Non-Interconnected Island Systems

The generation management concept for non-interconnected island (NII) systems is traditionally based on simple, semi-empirical operating rules dating back to the era before the massive deployment of renewable energy sources (RES), which do not achieve maximum RES penetration, optimal dispatch of thermal units and satisfaction of system security criteria. Nowadays, more advanced unit commitment (UC) and economic-dispatch (ED) approaches based on optimization techniques are gradually introduced to safeguard system operation against severe disturbances, to prioritize RES participation and to optimize dispatch of the thermal generation fleet. The main objective of this paper is to comparatively assess the traditionally applied priority listing (PL) UC method and a more sophisticated mixed integer linear programming (MILP) UC optimization approach, dedicated to NII power systems. Additionally, to facilitate the comparison of the UC approaches and quantify their impact on systems security, a first attempt is made to relate the primary reserves capability of each unit to the maximum acceptable frequency deviation at steady state conditions after a severe disturbance and the droop characteristic of the unit’s speed governor. The fundamental differences between the two approaches are presented and discussed, while daily and annual simulations are performed and the results obtained are further analyzed.