Use of ultracapacitor for provision of inertial response in virtual synchronous generator: Design and experimental validation*

The growing penetration of converter-interfaced renewable energy sources (CI-RES) has revealed several challenges related to the stability of the electrical grids. To mitigate these issues, there is an ongoing research regarding the concept of virtual synchronous generators, where new control schemes are employed to enable CI-RES with integrated fast-acting energy storage system (ESS) to provide ancillary services to the grid, e.g., inertial response (IR). Although several solutions have been proposed in the literature, the proper integration and energy management of the ESS towards IR provision remains an open research topic. In this paper, an holistic control approach is presented regarding IR provision by a system comprising of a CI-RES and an ultracapacitor (UC). The proposed approach is supplemented by an efficient energy management system allowing the UC to release/absorb energy during IR provision while always ensuring the operation of the UC voltage within its technical limits. The robustness and the performance of the proposed method are experimentally evaluated in a lab setup, where all the components of the proposed system, i.e., CI-RES and UC have been analytically implemented.