A Frequency Control Strategy Using Power Line Communication in a Smart Microgrid

This paper presents an application of power-line communication (PLC) as a viable solution for frequency regulation in a smart microgrid. The microgrid under consideration comprises a diesel generator with a frequency controller and another synchronous generator operating in the constant power mode. Frequency regulation is achieved in the microgrid by communicating the frequency deviation (information) from the control center to the diesel generator using PLC. The information received at the other end is used for frequency regulation. A simple yet effective M -ary amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation-based PLC system is proposed for information transmission. A comparative analysis of M -ary ASK and M -ary frequency-shift keying (FSK)-based PLC systems is also presented. Approximate closed-form expressions for the average symbol error rate and the average achievable rate are derived for both the PLC systems, assuming that the PLC channel coefficients and the additive impulsive noise samples are derived from a log-normal distribution and a Bernoulli-Gaussian process, respectively. The results show that M -ary ASK is a better choice for PLC than M -ary FSK. Furthermore, the delay introduced in the control loop while using the proposed PLC system is negligible, and therefore, the stability of the microgrid is also ensured.