Active power consensus in microgrids

The use of microgrids for the integration of renewable energy sources and for the electric supply of rural or isolated areas reveals a large number of problems to be solved for their efficient implementation. One of these is active power sharing. Here we propose a consensus based approach to extend the usual droop controller strategy to achieve power sharing and to numerically evaluate and design different controllers (or consensus algorithms) that might include communication between the inverters. For that we propose an affine approximation of the microgrid power dynamics and define performance indicators based on optimization problems with LMI (linear matrix inequalities) restrictions. The results are illustrated by means of a simulation example.