Controls in power systems with renewable energy penetration

Abstract

An algorithm to evaluate the control performance of existing voltage and frequency control equipment is developed and tested using real power system data. This allows the power system operator to ensure all resources are supporting the power system control effort. In the third part an extended automatic generation control scheme is proposed, to allow control areas to share some of the existing control resources. The advantage of this proposed scheme is to avoid a significant increase in the cost of operating the system, with the need for additional control resources due to the renewable penetration.

The increased penetration of renewable resources in the power system leads to more volatility and uncertainty. Therefore, it becomes very important for the power system to be tightly controlled. This dissertation addresses some of the issues associated with maintaining tight control of the system under these circumstances. The first part of the dissertation investigates some of the stability issues associated with the increased renewable penetration and develops a controller to improve small signal stability using renewable generation resources. The second part of this dissertation deals with the challenges traditional resources face, to maintain a tightly controlled system.