Coordinated Wide-Area Control of Multiple Controllers in a Modern Power System

Low frequency oscillations (LFOs) are recognized as one of the most challenging problems in electric grids as they limit power transfer capability and can result in system instability. In recent years, the deployment of phasor measurement units (PMUs) has increased the accessibility to time-synchronized wide-area measurements, which has, in turn, enabledthe effective detection and control of the oscillatory modes of the power system. This work assesses the stability improvements that can be achieved through the coordinated wide-area control of power system stabilizers (PSSs), static VAr compensators (SVCs), and supplementary damping controllers (SDCs) of high voltage DC (HVDC) lines, for damping electromechanical oscillations in a modern power system. The improved damping is achieved by designing different types of coordinated wide-area damping controllers (CWADC) that employ partial state-feedback. The first design methodology uses a linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based mixed H2/Hinfty control that is robust for multiple operating scenarios. To counteract the negative impact of communication failure or missing PMU measurements on the designed control, a scheme to identify the alternate set of feedback signals is proposed. Additionally, the impact of delays on the performance of the control design is investigated. The second approach is motivated by the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing the performance of interconnected power systems. Two different wide-area coordinated control schemes are developed using deep neural networks (DNNs) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), while accounting for the uncertainties present in the power system. The DNN-CWADC learns to make control decisions using supervised learning; the training dataset consisting of polytopic controllers designed with the help of LMI-based mixed H2/Hinfty optimization. The DRL-CWADC learns to adapt to the system uncertainties based on its continuous interaction with the power system environment by employing an advanced version of the state-of-the-art deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm referred to as bounded exploratory control-based DDPG (BEC-DDPG). The studies performed on a 29 machine, 127 bus equivalent model of theWestern Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system-embedded with different types of damping controls have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed CWADCs.