Multi-Renewable Energy Agent Based Control for Economic Dispatch and Frequency Regulation of Autonomous Renewable Grid

This paper addresses frequency regulation and the economic dispatch problem of an Autonomous Renewable Grid (ARG) primarily composed of Multi Renewable Energy Agents (MRAs), interfaced through DC/AC inverters. A large number of MRAs that have an inherent fluctuating nature and frequent disturbances in inter-connected systems require fast and robust control to stabilize the frequency and to maintain cost-effective operation of an ARG. To address the above control challenges, Distributed Averaging Integrator (DAI) based control schemes were proposed in various research works. The main flaws of such schemes were slow convergence, sluggish response, poor transient performance and a difficult selection of an appropriate damping-factor. The proposed approach introduces a Distributed Sliding Mode Control (DSMC) based solution for fast convergence and improved transient response. The DSMC control is based on a distributed sliding surface, designed using a combination of local information and information from neighboring MRAs. The control is implemented locally at each MRA and achieves the asymptotic global consensus. Finally, the convergence of the proposed control scheme is proved mathematically, and performance is validated using the MRA system which has been implemented using MATLAB/Simulink. The results of the proposed control technique are compared with conventional DAI control, which shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of fast convergence, considering renewable resources as distributed generation.