Multi-Terminal Energy Router and Its Distributed Control Strategy in Micro-grid Community Applications

Abstract

Energy router (ER) is one of the core equipment for a micro-grid community. To coordinate the power flow among its terminals, centralized control is always applied. Centralized control relies on communications with a central controller and has lower reliability and flexibility. This work proposes a novel control strategy to achieve distributed power flow control without central controllers. The energy router has several terminals and each terminal is a three-phase Voltage Source Converter (VSC). All terminals only share a common DC link and have no other connections or information exchange. Each micro-grid is a self-governed entity and independently decides how much power is in need or can be provided. Every microgrid submits its power requirement to the ER in real-time together with an urgent coefficient and the ER decides how much to accept, fully or with a discount, according to the DClink voltage level. Simulations results are provided to validate the proposed solution for the operation of the energy router.