A novel VSG-based accurate voltage control and reactive power sharing method for islanded microgrids

Abstract

Islanded microgrids (IMGs) are more likely to be perturbed by renewable generation and load demand fluctuation, thus leading to system instability. The virtual synchronous generator (VSG) control has become a promising method in the microgrids stability control area for its inertia-support capability. However, the improper power sharing and inaccurate voltage control problems of the distributed generations (DGs) in microgrids still has not been solved with a unified method. This paper proposes a novel VSG equivalent control method named Imitation Excitation Control (IEC). In this method, a multi-objective control strategy for voltage and reactive power in a low voltage grid that considers a non-negligible resistance to reactance ratio (R/X) is proposed. With the IEC method, the voltage drop across feeders is compensated, thus the terminal voltage of each inverter will be regulated, which will effectively stabilize the PCC (point of common coupling) voltage and inhibit the circular current. Meanwhile, this method can realize accurate reactive power tracking the reference value, making it accessible for reactive power scheduling. What is more, the reasonability of the IEC model, namely the equivalent mechanical characteristic and transient process inertia support between VSGs and conventional synchronous generators (SG), is illustrated in this paper. Moreover, steady-state stability is proved by the small-signal modeling method, and the energy required by inertia support is given. Finally, the simulation result validates the effectiveness of the proposed method, and it is also demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms the conventional droop control method.