Load frequency control of a two-area using virtual inertia and a PSO-PID controller with integrated electric vehicles

Abstract

The increasing penetration level of converter-based renewable energy sources in the grid causes low inertia, which leads to grid frequency variation. To deal with this problem, virtual inertia (VI) control with particle swarm optimisation (PSO)-based PID controller has been applied to a two-area power system with multi-generating units. This improves the frequency variation and response time. In this paper, a derivative control technique has been used to emulate the VI, which controls the active power of the energy storage device which provides the inertia support to the power system. The integral time absolute error (ITAE) has been used as the performance index for PSO. Furthermore, the primary frequency control is augmented by integrating electric vehicles as vehicle-to-grid resources. Finally, various cases of disturbance and a comparative analysis have been performed between the VI with PSO-PID control and conventional control (PI). The simulation has been performed using MATLAB/Simulink, which demonstrates the superior performance of the VI with PSO-PID over a conventional controller by improving the settling by 45.84% in Area 1 and 39.77% in Area 2 for the almost same overshoot of frequency deviation. These simulation results have also been validated by performing hardware-in-loop (HIL) experiments utilising the OPAL-RT real-time simulator.