Active and reactive power flow analysis of a STATCOM with virtual synchronous machine control

To facilitate integration of renewable energy sources, static synchronous compensators (STATCOMs) are a typical solution to smooth the point of common coupling (PCC). A recently proposed control method, virtual synchronous machine (VSM), which controls grid-interfaced inverters to behave like synchronous machines, has been applied to STATCOMs and shows improved performance over conventional D-Q frame-based STATCOMs. However the limitations of the VSM method have not been studied. This paper addresses possible concerns about active power compensation which may lead to dc link voltage collapse during the transients introduced by the VSM method with some solutions proposed and compared.