Managing Spinning Reserves for Power System Stability under Increased Renewable Energy Penetration

Increased penetration levels of renewable energy-based generation pose technical challenges to stable operation of a power system, particularly under lacking storage. The power system becomes more vulnerable to significant system frequency variations due to lack of system inertia. This paper proposes a remedial measure to fulfill the inertia requirement using the spinning reserves in an optimal way to improve the inertial response. The system frequency behavior during a contingency under inadequate system inertia, is visualized with the aid of a model power system. The effectiveness of the proposed method, under varying generator configurations, is analyzed using a modified IEEE 09 bus system in the PSCAD platform. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstarte encouraging results.