A distributed control framework for microgrid with renewables and energy storage systems

The existing distribution system operation philosophy faces great challenges as renewable energy penetration and microgrid deployment continue to grow. To address these challenges, new simulation tools need to be developed to investigate the impacts of renewables, distributed generation resources, microgrids, and the interaction between any two of them. To this end, China Southern Power Grid (CSG) developed a Dynamic Simulation Program (DSP) using the state-of-the-art high performance parallel computing technologies. Well-known issues of renewables include high intermittency and low inertia, which require faster control actions to be taken. The existing centralized control requires communication infrastructure from the central controller to all agents, which is prohibitive in the case of high renewable penetration. This paper presents a distributed control framework for a distribution system/microgrid with high renewable penetration. Within this framework, each distributed generator only needs information from its neighbor(s) to achieve optimal operation. This paper presents the modeling of various distributed generators and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm using this recently developed DSP, through which the advanced features of the software are also showcased.