A Hardware-in-the-Loop Validation of Advanced Balancing Services in Power Systems

The growing penetration of renewable sources, mainly interfacing the grid via power electronics, represents a new challenge for frequency stabilization in power systems. As conventional generation is replaced by non-synchronous sources, the amount of inertia available in the network decreases. Moreover, the associated controls of synchronous machines (PSS, AVR, governor) are also replaced by devices that typically do not modify their behaviour to frequency or voltage changes. As a possible solution to these new conditions in the grid, new functionality has been proposed in the context of the ABS4TSO (Advanced Balancing Services for Transmission System Operators) project. In this paper we present an automatic hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) testing procedure that validates novel functionality aiming at frequency stability issues arising nowadays in low inertia grids. The existing HiL setup is verified against the expected response (modelled in a pure simulation environment) and validated against laboratory tests. Such a setup allows us to properly define the specification of novel ancillary services based on the real behaviour of non-synchronous sources.