Investigations on application of curve fitting in power system inertia estimation

ABSTRACT

As the share of renewable energy sources in the power system keeps growing, a new issue with frequency stability – diminishing and changing inertia – has emerged. Estimating power system inertia has received a lot of attention lately in order to market design of synthetic inertia as an additional service and implement timely corrective steps for robust frequency control. Curve fitting technique has emerged as one of the promising techniques for estimation of power system inertia, however, many challenging aspects need to be addressed for its practical applications. This study aims to systematically assess the effectiveness of the curve fitting method under a range of operational parameters and conditions, such as the curve fitting order, the length of data to be used for curve fitting after an event begins, and the length of the moving average filter applied to the frequency data to remove oscillatory and noise from the frequency transient. The simulation studies have been performed on DIgSILENT and MATLAB platforms. The results show that very high and very low order curve fitting results are high errors and the 5^th order model with mean error in estimated value of inertia less than 1% has outperformed others. The analysis on various window width of moving average filter found that increasing the window width results in more error. For IEEE-9 bus system, a filter up to 850 ms width has a mean percentage error below 1%. The analysis also revealed that the duration of the data used for curve fitting is not significant. For variation of the duration of the data used for the curve fitting from 50 ms to 500 ms, the estimated inertia values are found to be in a close range of 2.4881 s to 2.5262 s, for the single machine system with H = 2.5 s. The analysis presented in this study will be useful for effective application of curve fitting method in inertia estimation.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Curve fitting method
• frequency stability
• inertia estimation
• low-inertia system
• Rate of change of frequency (RoCoF)
• Renewable energy sources (RES)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).