Adaptive coordination control strategy of renewable energy sources, hydrogen production unit, and fuel cell for frequency regulation of a hybrid distributed power system

Abstract

Owing to the significant number of hybrid generation systems (HGSs) containing various energy sources, coordination between these sources plays a vital role in preserving frequency stability. In this paper, an adaptive coordination control strategy for renewable energy sources (RESs), an aqua electrolyzer (AE) for hydrogen production, and a fuel cell (FC)-based energy storage system (ESS) is proposed to enhance the frequency stability of an HGS. In the proposed system, the excess energy from RESs is used to power electrolysis via an AE for hydrogen energy storage in FCs. The proposed method is based on a proportional-integral (PI) controller, which is optimally designed using a grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm to estimate the surplus energy from RESs (i.e., a proportion of total power generation of RESs: Kn). The studied HGS contains various types of generation systems including a diesel generator, wind turbines, photovoltaic (PV) systems, AE with FCs, and ESSs (e.g., battery and flywheel). The proposed method varies Kn with varying frequency deviation values to obtain the best benefits from RESs, while damping the frequency fluctuations. The proposed method is validated by considering different loading conditions and comparing with other existing studies that consider Kn as a constant value. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method, which changes Kn value and subsequently stores the power extracted from the RESs in hydrogen energy storage according to frequency deviation changes, performs better than those that use constant Kn. The statistical analysis for frequency deviation of HGS with the proposed method has the best values and achieves large improvements for minimum, maximum, difference between maximum and minimum, mean, and standard deviation compared to the existing method.