Electric vehicles contribution for frequency control with inertial emulation

•Innovative control approach for EV that emulates conventional generators inertia.•Inertial emulation and a droop control were used to mimic generators governors.•Enables EV participation in frequency control with small effort in terms of energy.•Enables a better exploitation of variable renewable resources in isolated systems.

This work proposes a novel primary frequency control technique with electric vehicles (EV), the combination of inertial emulation and droop control, for isolated systems. Being EV dispersed along the grids, the impacts of possible delayed actions are assessed. Islanded systems have reduced inertia and so load/generation imbalance situations may lead to large frequency deviations. Therefore, this paper focuses essentially on the EV contribution for primary reserves provision, in order to allow a safe integration of further intermittent Renewable Energy Sources (RES). An avant-garde generation dispatch was adopted for the test system used in this work, fully reliant on RES, mainly conventional hydro units and some wind generation. The studied disturbances include a rapid shortfall on wind power production and a sequence of consecutive events caused by the variability of the wind resource in an ordinary situation.