A Low-cost Controller to Enable Synthetic Inertia Response of Distributed Energy Resources

Due to the increasing penetration of power electronic interfaced power sources, total system inertia of power systems is decreasing. Significant frequency excursions and high rate of change of frequency (RoCoF) can affect power system security. A contribution to system inertia can be provided by distributed energy resources (DERs) at end-user level. This paper investigates the possibility to develop a low-cost controller that is able to autonomously measure frequency and RoCoF, and implement a synthetic inertia control law on the management system of remotely controllable DERs. The controller was implemented and tested on a real battery storage system through Power Hardware-in-the-Loop experiments.