Control of a microgrid with unbalanced loads using virtual negative-sequence impedance loop

Abstract

This paper presents an effective control strategy for autonomous operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid (MG) consisting of several dispatchable distributed generation (DG) units. Each electronically-coupled DG unit supplies the loads which can be unbalanced due to the inclusion of single-phase loads. The proportional resonance (PR) and droop controllers are, respectively, used to regulate the load voltage and share the average powers among the DG units. The virtual negative-sequence impedance controller (VNSIC) is proposed to effectively compensate the negative-sequence currents of the unbalanced loads. Moreover, the VNSIC minimizes the negative-sequence currents in the MV lines and thus, improving the power quality of the MG. The performance of the proposed control strategy is verified by using digital time-domain simulation studies in the PSCAD/EMTDC software environment.