A novel deep reinforcement learning enabled sparsity promoting adaptive control method to improve the stability of power systems with wind energy penetration

With increasing proportion of wind energy in power systems, the intermittence of such energy makes the system run a wide range of operating conditions. In this context, ordinary power system stabilizers (PSS) tuned based on the linearized model of the system at one operating condition may not be able to effectively damp low frequency oscillations (LFO), which brings great challenges to the stability of the system. To this end, this paper proposes a novel sparsity promoting adaptive control method for the online self-tuning of the PSS parameter settings. Different from the existing adaptive control methods, the proposed method combines deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm and sensitivity analysis theory to train an agent to learn the sparse coordinated control policy of multi-PSS. After training, the well-trained agent can be employed for online sparse coordinated adaptive control, and the control signal is only applied, when it is required and only to the key PSS parameters that have the maximum influence on the system stability. Simulation results verify that the proposed method can make the PSS achieve the better performance of damping oscillation and robustness against the change of wind energy in comparison with other methods.