Dynamic frequency control of autonomous microgrid based on family-friendly controllable loads

Autonomous microgrid (AMG) develops fast in recent years due to the capability of supplying power to remote areas and avoiding high investment on transmission facilities. Frequency is a key issue for the stable operation of AMG with a large penetration of intermittent renewable energy resources, such as the wind turbines (WT), photovoltaic generators (PV), etc. The fast development of demand response technology provides a new opportunity for the frequency control of AMG. In this paper, a novel decentralized demand-side control (DDC) strategy for family-friendly controllable refrigerators considering customer comfort levels is proposed to regulate the frequency of AMG in coordination with energy storage system (ESS). The refrigerators under DDC respond to the local frequency signals and dynamically adjust their operation cycles. Meanwhile, a customer participation degree which is proportional to the frequency deviation is introduced to evaluate the customer comforts when participate in the frequency regulation. Finally, a benchmark low voltage AMG is established as the test system to verify the effectiveness of the DDC strategy. Simulation results show that the DDC strategy not only can improve the frequency control effect of AMG effectively, but also can reduce the capacity of ESS to a certain extent.