A Resource Aware Droop Control Strategy for a PV, Wind, and Energy Storage Flexible Power (Flexpower) Plant

This paper uses clusters of solar photovoltaic units, wind turbines, and battery energy storage systems as a single controllable plant and proposes a method to enable adaptive plant wide droop control. Each of these clusters is defined as a Flexpower plant. The proposed control is presented with multiple configurations that enable the same overall droop characteristic to the Flexpower plant, but use each of the resource technologies in a different manner. One of the control configurations considers the availability of the resources for wind and solar units, as well as the state of charge of energy storage units, when distributing droop action to each unit that comprise the Flexpower plant. The proposed approaches were tested in a small power system where it is shown that the Flexpower plant can provide frequency regulation to the system in a variety of ways depending on which of the proposed control configurations was selected.