Optimizing the Participation of Distributed Energy Resources in Inertial and Primary-frequency Response

Ensuring power quality in the face of the rapid and admittedly ad-hoc integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) is a challenging task. It is therefore widely accepted that DERs ought to provide a wide array of ancillary services such as reactive-power support, voltage control, frequency control, and operating reserves to ensure their synergistic operation alongside conventional generators, and seamless integration into the bulk power system. This talk outlines an approach to enable the optimal participation of DERs in inertial and primary-frequency response. Leveraging a reduced-order model description of frequency dynamics, DERs' synthetic inertias and droop coefficients are designed to meet time-domain performance objectives of frequency overshoot and steady-state regulation. Furthermore, an optimization-based method centered around classical economic dispatch is developed to ensure that DERs share the power injections in proportion to their power ratings as they participate in frequency control.
Sairaj Dhople received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, 2009, and 2012, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of Minnesota, where he is affiliated with the Power and Energy Systems research group. His research interests include modeling, analysis, and control of power electronics and power systems with a focus on renewable integration. He was the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion and the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.