Inertia response and frequency control techniques for renewable energy sources: A review

Preservation of the environment has become the main motivation to integrate more renewable energy sources (RESs) in electrical networks. However, several technical issues are prevalent at high level RES penetration. The most important technical issue is the difficulty in achieving the frequency stability of these new systems, as they contain less generation units that provide reserve power. Moreover, new power systems have small inertia constant due to the decoupling of the RESs from the AC grid using power converters. Therefore, the RESs in normal operation cannot participate with other conventional generation sources in frequency regulation. This paper reviews several inertia and frequency control techniques proposed for variable speed wind turbines and solar PV generators. Generally, the inertia and frequency regulation techniques were divided into two main groups. The first group includes the deloading technique, which allow the RESs to keep a certain amount of reserve power, while the second group includes inertia emulation, fast power reserve, and droop techniques, which is used to release the RESs reserve power at under frequency events.