Robust Cooperative Load Frequency Control for Enhancing Wind Energy Integration in Multi-Area Power Systems

The wind energy, as a kind of renewable energy resources, has the potential to replace traditional fossil fuels. However, its intermittent power output can incur frequency instability due to the instantaneous unbalance between power generation and load demand. To smooth the penetration of wind energy, this paper presents a robust cooperative load frequency control (LFC) strategy for multi-area power systems, which is a hierarchical control approach. For the low-level wind turbine control, this paper adopts model predictive control (MPC) method to achieve the rated wind power tracking. In the meantime, an improved event-triggered scheme (ETS) considering multiple historic released signals is employed to relieve the computational burden of MPC. For the high-level cooperative LFC, this paper incorporates the robust performance index in the control synthesis to suppress the impact of intermittent wind power on frequency stability. In addition, to address the underlying shift of the steady-state operating point caused by the intermittent wind power supply, this paper improves the commonly used small-signal LFC model by adding an uncertain matrix, which reasonably explains the possible change of system parameters and extends the applicability of the traditional LFC model. Simulations are done on a four-area power system, and the results verify the efficacy of the presented event-triggered scheme and the robust cooperative LFC approach.