Primary Frequency Regulation With Load-Side Participation—Part I: Stability and Optimality

We present a method to design distributed generation and demand control schemes for primary frequency regulation in power networks that guarantee asymptotic stability and ensure fairness of allocation. We impose a passivity condition on net power supply variables and provide explicit steady-state conditions on a general class of generation and demand control dynamics that ensure convergence of solutions to equilibria that solve an appropriately constructed network optimization problem. We also show that the inclusion of controllable demand results in a drop in steady-state frequency deviations. We discuss how various classes of dynamics used in recent studies fit within our framework and show that this allows for less conservative stability and optimality conditions. We illustrate our results with simulations on the IEEE 68-bus transmission system and the IEEE 37-bus distribution system with static and dynamic demand response schemes.