Distributed Secondary Frequency Control via Price Consensus

The task of secondary frequency control in typical power systems is to drive frequency deviations remaining after primary control back to zero, while considering economic principles. This is often solved with a central optimizer that communicates its derived set points to all participating units. We propose a novel distributed scheme for secondary control that only requires that each unit can communication with few others, and still achieves frequency restoration with economic optimality under mild conditions. The proposed approach avoids a single point of failure, reduces the central installation overhead and is robust against the separation or partial break-down of the communication grid. The algorithm is validated with simulations of an exemplary micro grid.