Modelling of renewable energy power plant controllers for steady-state studies using an extended power flow formulation

Abstract

The increasing penetration of large-scale wind and photovoltaic plants has created new challenges for the secure and reliable operation of power systems. To face these challenges, these renewable plants are composed of numerous inverter-based resources that use centralized controllers to satisfy grid code requirements related to frequency and voltage control, both under dynamic and steady-state conditions. In this paper, an extended power flow formulation is proposed for the steady-state modelling of power plant controllers along with their power flow controls including those associated with droop control, suitable for any plant topology and number of regulation devices. The effectiveness of this modelling approach is validated against WECC generic models using dynamic simulations in PSS®E. For this purpose, a 13-bus 5-generator test system representing a 100-MW renewable power plant is studied. The accuracy of the introduced formulation is demonstrated since it presents absolute errors smaller than 0.2% between both fundamentally different methods. Additionally, the well-known IEEE RTS-96 test system is used to model 29 power plant controllers with 93 generators, thus showing the practicality of the proposed formulation. It can be envisaged that this timely tool is valuable for power system operation and expansion planning considering large-scale variable renewable energy power plants.