Power oscillations damping using wide-area-based solar plant considering adaptive time-delay compensation

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of the ever increasing penetration of renewable energy into the power grid to solve challenging problems such as inter area power oscillations without the use of expensive power electronic devices and power system stabilizers. The increase in size of interconnected power systems, energy demand, and installation of remote renewable energies with relatively weak tie-lines has witnessed different stability problems such as low-frequency inter-area oscillations. Inter-area oscillation reduces system stability and transmission capacity. Without effective damping control mechanism, these oscillations could prolong and threaten the security of the system. This paper proposes a supplementary controller from a photovoltaic (PV) solar plant for damping inter-area oscillations. Due to its strong correlation to active power flow and monitoring system stress, area phase-angle difference is employed for the remote signal input of the controller. The signal can be obtained from phasor measurement unit (PMU) through wide-area measurements systems (WAMS). To deal with a wide range of variable delay in the signal input, an adaptive compensator is designed to reduce the impact of the communication latency using neuro-fuzzy inference system. A two-area four-machine test system is used and simulated with a Simulink-based package developed for the work of this study. The time-domain simulations, modal and frequency response analysis demonstrate the capability of the proposed controller to effectively damp inter-area oscillations, under a small- and large-scale disturbances and against a wide range of time delays.