Abstract
The Multiple Microgrids (MMGs) concept has been identified as a promising solution for the management of large-scale power grids in order to maximize the use of widespread renewable energies sources. However, its deployment in realistic operation scenarios is still an open issue due to the presence of non-ideal and unreliable communication systems that allow each component within the power network to share information about its state. Indeed, due to technological constraints, multiple time-varying communication delays consistently appear during data acquisition and the transmission process and their effects must be considered in the control design phase. To this aim, this paper addresses the voltage regulation control problem for MMGs systems in the presence of time-varying communication delays. To solve this problem, we propose a novel hierarchical two-layer distributed control architecture that accounts for the presence of communication latencies in the information exchange. More specifically, the upper control layer aims at guaranteeing a proper and economical reactive power dispatch among MMGs, while the lower control layer aims at ensuring voltage regulation of all electrical buses within each MG to the desired voltage set-point. By leveraging a proper Driver Generator Nodes Selection Algorithm, we first provide the best choice of generator nodes which, considering the upper layer control goal, speeds up the voltage synchronization process of all the buses within each MG to the voltage set-point computed by the upper-control layer. Then, the lower control layer, on the basis of this desired voltage value, drives the reactive power capability of each smart device within each MG and compensates for possible voltage deviations. Simulation analysis is carried out on the realistic case study of an MMGs system consisting of two identical IEEE 14-bus test systems and the numerical results disclose the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, as well as its robustness with respect to load fluctuations.
Highlights
The increasing use of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), Distributed Generators (DGs) and storage systems is imperative for the introduction of Microgrids (MGs) in actual power distribution networks because of the many benefits it could lead to in terms of reductions in power losses and electrical system performance improvements
In grid-connected mode, the MG is tied to the main grid trough the Point of Common Coupling (PCC), allowing power exchange from or to the main grid and voltage/frequency regulation according to utility specification [3]
Since these future power grids can be restructured as cyber-physical systems, whose components deal with power flow management and with data transmission to ensure a distributed control capability [7], most of the existing works in the technical literature leverage Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework in order to model the resulting power network
Summary
The increasing use of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), Distributed Generators (DGs) and storage systems is imperative for the introduction of Microgrids (MGs) in actual power distribution networks because of the many benefits it could lead to in terms of reductions in power losses and electrical system performance improvements. The control architecture deployment in realistic operation scenarios is still an open problem, which warrants further investigation [17,22] To overcome this limitation and solve the problem of determining the optimal power dispatch in practical MMGs systems, we propose a novel cooperative cluster-oriented hierarchical control architecture that accounts for the presence of communication time-varying delays. This is done via a cooperative control action that, by exploiting delayed state information shared among the smart devices within the single MG via the intra-cluster communication network, drives the reactive power generation capability of each smart device and compensates for possible voltage deviations.
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