A Novel Automatic Generation Control for Thermal and Gas Power Plants

Automatic generation control (AGC) plays an important role in adjusting the power output of multiple generators at different power plants, in response to load changes. Most of the research focuses on either thermal or hydro power plants. However, the combination of multi-source generators is more realistic for the study of AGC. Moreover, existing methods to design control gains in integral/ proportional-integral (PI)/ proportional-integral-differential (PID) controllers for AGC is often time consuming and largely depended on the designer's experience. To address this issue, a novel PID control method for AGC is proposed, where the control gains can be self-adjusted automatically and dynamically under different disturbances. Also, in the proposed control method, both gas units and thermal units are considered to participate in frequency regulation. The proposed control method is tested on a modified IEEE 39 bus system and compared with conventional PID based control approach. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.