Cooperative Frequency Control for Autonomous AC Microgrids

Distributed secondary control strategies have been recently studied for frequency regulation in droop-based AC Microgrids. Unlike centralized secondary control, the distributed one might fail to provide frequency synchronization and proportional active power sharing simultaneously, due to having different control parameters. This paper introduces a cooperative algorithm that regulates the system frequency while maintaining the power sharing properties of droop control. Dynamic consensus protocol is used to estimate the average of normalized active powers in the entire MG. This estimation is then added to primary control, compensating the frequency drop caused by the droop mechanism. The proposed controller is fully distributed, meaning that each source exchange information with only its direct neighbors through a sparse communication network. This controller has a unique feature that it does not require measuring the system frequency as compared to the other presented methods. An ac Microgrid with four sources is used to verify the performance of the proposed control methodology.