Flexible Control of Synthetic Inertia in Co-Located Clusters of Inverter-Based Resources

Abstract

This paper uses co-located wind and photovoltaic generation, along with battery energy storage, as a single plant and introduces a method to provide a flexible synthetic inertia (SI) response based on plant-wide settings. The proposed controller accounts for variable resources and correctly adjusts device responses when an inverter-based resource (IBR) may become unavailable to provide a consistent plant level SI response. The flexible SI response is shown to adequately replace the lost synchronous inertial response from equivalent conventional generation when IBR penetration is approximately 25% in a small power system. Furthermore, it is shown that a high gain SI response provided by the combined IBR plant can reduce the rate of change of frequency magnitude over 50% from the equivalently rated conventional generation response.