Load frequency control in deregulated environments via active disturbance rejection

•LADRC is designed for load frequency control systems in deregulated environments.•An anti-GRC scheme for LADRC in load frequency control is proposed.•The proposed method is easy to apply and good damping performance can be achieved.

Linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) method is investigated for the load frequency control (LFC) of power systems in deregulated environments. The connections between one area and the rest of the system and the effects of possible contracts are treated as a set of new disturbances besides the system load. LADRC uses an extended state observer (ESO) to estimate the disturbances and compensates them quickly. Thus it can achieve good disturbance rejection performance and is a good candidate for LFC design. The proposed method is tested on two power systems. Simulation results show that the LADRC is simple to tune for load frequency control systems, and good performance can be achieved.