Online Estimation of System Inertia in a Power Network Utilizing Synchrophasor Measurements

System inertia plays a vital role in controlling the angular stability of the system during a disturbance. Due to increased penetration of power electronic interfaced sources, such as Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) source, the overall system inertia reduces and varies depending on their operating conditions. In this paper, an approach for online inertia estimation in the power system network with SPV sources is proposed, using the synchronized measurements from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). An equivalent swing equation is used to emulate the network dynamics. A relationship between the inertia constant and the roots of this equation is determined. In order to numerically obtain the roots, the Estimation of Signal Parameter via Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) method is first used to find the modes present in the frequency signal. A new formulation is proposed to extract an equivalent mode from all the obtained modes. Also, to avoid phase step error, Rate Of Change Of Frequency (ROCOF) is estimated from the equivalent mode of the frequency signal. Results obtained for the 39 bus New England system for various test cases, using Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS), prove the efficacy and superiority of the proposed approach over the existing approaches in the literature.