An Electric Vehicles Based Virtual Inertia Control for Frequency Support of Low-Inertia Microgrid

The impetus to “Go Green” has led to the increasing integration of renewable energy into the emerging grid. The increased share of renewables in the existing grid results in decreased rotational inertia, which necessitates the requirement of fast and efficient inertia control techniques and energy storage devices. However, due to the high capital cost and running cost associated with energy storage devices, electric vehicles provide a promising solution for the emulation of inertia in the low inertia grid. The paper investigates the utilization of electric vehicles for enhancing the inertial emulation capacity and promoting frequency stability of the standalone microgrid. A Genetic Algorithm optimized derivative-type virtual inertia control that takes into account both inertia and damping in the virtual inertia loop along with electric vehicles has been proposed. The frequency response of the standalone microgrid under the proposed virtual inertia control utilizing electric vehicles has been investigated for different EV penetration levels, variations in loads, and uncertainty of the renewables. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control is validated by the comparative analysis of electric vehicles based virtual inertia control with the external energy storage devices based virtual inertia control with and without controller parameter optimization.