A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Wide-Area Automatic Generation Control Scheme

The increased penetration of renewable resources has made frequency regulation and generation control growing concerns for power system operators. Due to the variability of renewable resources and the reduced inertia leading to the deterioration of system frequency response, many balancing areas expect a need to increase their regulation services and non-spinning reserves. This also increases the total cost of system operation and may elevate location marginal energy prices. This article addresses the scheduling of energy interchange between balancing areas, in light of optimizing regulation services in the entire interconnected power system. A control architecture is defined to extend the existing area control error concept to allow more cooperation between interconnected balancing areas. In this scheme, regulation services from different balancing areas can be pooled such that a loss of generation in one control area can utilize regulation services from multiple areas resulting in a more economic dispatch of generation resources. The effectiveness of the wide-area control scheme is demonstrated in a large-scale testbed for two power systems with high renewable penetration.