Advanced Control Of Microgrids For Frequency And Voltage Stability

This thesis addresses the frequency and voltage stability issues of stand-alone microgrids with high penetration of renewable energy by making use of energy storage devices, and is divided into two main parts.In the first part, we propose a systematic design of a multi-variable robust control structure for frequency regulation in a diesel-photovoltaic-supercapacitor hybrid power generation system operating in stand-alone mode. The proposed control structure relies on a two-level architecture: classical PI-based current tracking controllers are placed on the low control level and receive references from an H-infinity-control-based upper level. A comprehensive methodology that casts the specific engineering demands of microgrid operation into H-infinity control formalism is detailed. It is also shown how closed-loop dynamic performance requirements must at their turn be taken into account in the initial microgrid setup and sizing, namely in appropriately choosing and rating the energy storage system. Then, a robust performance analysis of the synthesized H-infinity controller in the presence of various load disturbances, photovoltaic output active power variations, and model uncertainties is carried out in order to determine the maximum parameter variation range for which the imposed control performances are respected for the considered operating point. Numerical simulations performed with MATLAB/Simulink show the effectiveness of the proposed frequency robust control strategy on a MVA-rated microgrid. A rapid-prototyping test bench, which is composed of a real supercapacitor-based energy storage system and an emulated diesel-photovoltaic-load grid, is developed in order to experimentally validate this control strategy.The second part of this thesis focuses on computing an H-infinity-based multi-variable voltage controller in order to robustly force the voltage magnitude of the point of common coupling to satisfy dynamic specifications. The same idea of cascaded two-level control structure - where this controller is placed on an upper control level and provides the references to current controllers placed on a lower level - is aslo adopted. Then, the performance and robustness of the proposed H-infinity controller in the presence of various load and photovoltaic reactive power disturbances, as well as model uncertainties, are studied based on MATLAB/Simulink time-domain simulations.