Dynamic Performance Evaluation of Utility-Linked Rural Microgrids
摘要
Rural areas in developing countries are still refrained from continuous and uninterrupted power supply to power their household and run small industries. Thus, we can say that these rural areas are weakly connected to the utility grid. The main reasons for poor power supply are weak infrastructure, lack of adequate generation to fulfill the demand-supply gap, dependency on long-distance transmission, frequent load shedding, and distributed generation. This demand-supply gap can be minimized by installing renewable energy sources with the local load forming rural microgrid and connecting to the utility grid. The grid connection would help to maintain the power supply due to the variable output characteristics of renewable energy sources thus also acting as a buffer to the local power system. This paper presents a novel approach towards modeling of utility connected rural microgrid comprising renewable energy sources considering control architecture for marinating frequency-voltage interdependency. Accordingly, a frequency-based voltage controller is introduced. Further, the model has been verified in view of various scenarios with a fluctuation in load demand and power input to renewables. The controllers are tuned such that in case of increase in load or decrease in power generation, power demand is met from the utility grid, and in case of surplus generation, the power is fed to the grid, therefore, developing microgrid as business unit applicable for power trading. The model has been developed in Simulink/MATLAB. An integral square error criterion has been used for tuning the controllers to mitigate the oscillations.