Critical Assessment and Comparative Study of PID and ADRC Approaches Applied to AGC in Multi-Source Single Area Power System

The power system is continuously subjected to load changes. The load changes are dealt with the emergency control measures, such as generator shedding and also with automatic generation control (AGC). The AGC's primary purpose is to adjust the generator output power to minimize the power imbalance in the system, thus maintaining the system power at a nominal value. Conventionally, the AGC is designed with the help of an aggregated model of the system. The designed AGC is applied to the control area as a whole. However, in practice, all of the generators may not be able to comply with the AGC output to deliver the desired output. Moreover, all of the generators in the system not necessarily behave well for a given control signal under some operating conditions. In such cases, the practicality of different AGC control techniques has to be evaluated, which is the primary objective of this paper. In this paper, AGC is designed with the help of an aggregated model and implemented at each of the turbine models. Two control techniques are considered, namely, the PID and active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) to evaluate the implementation difficulties in a single area multi-source (coal, hydro and nuclear) power system.