Abstract

The use of high penetration converter-interfaced renewable energy (RE) based microgrids (MGs), due to the absence of rotational masses from conventional synchronous generators (SGs), may lead to a lack of inertia, which may lead the steeper frequency and voltage fluctuations that may in turn cause instability issues and challenges the normal operation of sensitive loads. To suppress these fluctuations and enhance the MGs stability, a novel model predictive control (MPC)-controlled virtual synchronous generator (VSG) for an energy storage system (ESS) is introduced. The proposed method can provide inertia support during transient states and enhance the dynamic characteristics of system voltage and frequency. By establishing the prediction model of VSG and designing the cost function for frequency and power, the increments of the needed active and reactive power are calculated then superposed on the power reference of VSG. The results show that the suppression performance of the voltage and frequency variations under loading transition with the proposed method is better than those of other techniques. Simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) results further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.