A fast and robust DOBC based frequency and voltage regulation scheme for future power systems with high renewable penetration

This paper proposes a disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC) scheme for frequency and voltage regulation in modern power systems with high renewable energy sources (RES) penetration. The proposed approach acts as a feed-forward control that improves the dynamic performance of the conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. The proposed voltage and frequency control has been validated through hardware-in-loop (HIL) implementation on OPAL-RT, and testing on laboratory-scale experimental test setup. The robustness of the proposed control scheme has been validated through simulations under worst-case and stochastic uncertainties to mitigate real-time variability in RES output and load. Real-time simulation results depict superior performance of the proposed control strategy in comparison to several well-established techniques under practical operating conditions, in the presence of communication delay and white noise. To validate the proposed control on laboratory-scale experimental setup, the digital twin of the physical plant transfer function has been designed. Results reveal that the proposed DOBC control scheme drastically improves the system performance without rendering much computational burden under practical operation scenarios.