Investigation of Virtual Inertia Topologies Considering Energy Storage Systems and Multi-Resource Virtual Power Plant

Abstract

Due to the high penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) into the power system, the distributed generators lack the rotating component to emulate inertia leading to frequency fluctuations. In this paper, multi-resource virtual power plant (VPP) with electric vehicle (EV) and data center (DC), with their batteries as energy storage systems (ESS) is considered to compensate for frequency fluctuations. Further case study of irradiance and load fluctuation is considered, which supports the frequency in a grid-connected microgrid with PV and a hydroelectric generator. Frequency support has been evaluated using three different techniques: conventional droop control, the frequency derivative model of the virtual synchronous generator (VSG) method, and the swing equation model of VSG. Comparison has been performed using multi-resource VPP, and it is observed that the VSG technique shows better performance compared to the droop approach while providing frequency support to the considered system.