Decentralized inverter control in microgrids based on power sharing information through wireless communications

For the future smart grid, decentralized inverter control is essential in distributed generation (DG) microgrids where a powerful central controller is unavailable for cost and reliability concerns. However, decentralized inverter control suffers from a limited system stability mainly because of the lack of communications among different inverters. In this paper, we investigate the stability enhancement of the droop based decentralized inverter control in microgrids. Specifically, we propose a power sharing based control strategy which incorporates the information provided by a wireless network to improve system stability. The wireless network is used to acquire the total real and reactive power generation of all DG units in a decentralized manner. Based on the desired power sharing of each DG unit and the acquired information of total generation, additional control terms are added to the traditional droop controller. We evaluate the performance of our proposed control strategy based on small-signal stability analysis. Extensive numerical results are presented to demonstrate the system stability.