Design and Implementation of Variable Inertia and Droop Controls on Tidal Power Generator

Abstract

Over the past decade, protection of the atmosphere has become the main inspiration to incorporate renewable power generator such as tidal power generator (TPG) in the power system. However, TPG is bringing great challenges to frequency regulation. TPG has small inertia constant due to use of power converters and also has no power reserve margin being operated on the maximum power point. To make TPG as similar to the conventional generator, different control strategies on TPG have received growing attention. In this paper, frequency regulation by deloaded TPG based on variable inertia and droop operations is proposed. The combined responses of inertia using fast power reserve (it provides instant frequency support and increases the rate of change of frequency deviation) and droop technique with pitch angle control (it allows the TPG to keep a certain amount of power reserve and helps to minimize the maximum frequency deviation) are presented. Also, two different control strategies such as constant inertia and droop strategy and variable inertia and droop strategy are implemented on TPG under tidal speed and load demand variations. Time simulations are executed in MATLAB/SIMULINKR to validate the efficacy of the frequency response capability of TPG.