Enhanced secondary frequency control via distributed peer-to-peer communication

The prevalent distributed generation resources warrant reconsideration on how their coordination is achieved. In this paper, we particularly focus on how to enhance secondary frequency control by exploiting peer-to-peer communication among the resources. We design a control framework based on a consensus-plus-global-innovation approach. The control signals of distributed resources are updated in response to a global innovation (utilizing the area control error signal), and additional information exchanged via communication among neighboring resources. We show that such a distributed control scheme can be very well approximated by a proportional-integral controller and stabilizes the system. Moreover, since our scheme takes advantage of both the global and neighboring information, simulation results demonstrate that our scheme stabilizes the system significantly faster than the conventional automatic generation control framework. In addition, our control scheme asymptotically achieves the cost effectiveness.