Distributed Multi-agent Consensus-Based Virtual Inertia Control of Low Inertial Microgrids

The large displacement of synchronous generators in favor of power electronics-based renewable resources degrades the network inertia. Small-scale power grids lacking sufficient inertia are highly vulnerable to instability issues. To alleviate such issues, virtual inertia synthesis has been proposed to enhance the dynamic performance of weak grids. This paper presents a distributed multi-agent consensus-based virtual inertia control to regulate the frequency in an islanded microgrid. The mandate of the presented multi-layer control layout is to simultaneously stabilize the grid and synchronize the power and the state of charge (SOC) for grid-integrated battery storage systems. In order to showcase the performance of the presented control protocols, extensive small-signal models are used to validate the presented study. The conducted simulation shows the ability of the proposed control design to minimize the Rate of Change of Frequency (ROCOF) during disturbances and achieve power and SOC consensus among the batteries in the multi-agent system.