Stability Analysis of Droop-Controlled Inverter-Based Power Grids via Timescale Separation

We consider the problem of stability analysis for distribution grids with linearized droop-controlled inverter and line dynamics. The inverters are modeled as voltage sources with controllable frequency and amplitude. This problem is very challenging for large networks as numerical simulations and detailed eigenvalue analysis are impactical. Motivated by the above limitations, we present in this paper a systematic and computationally efficient framework for stability analysis of inverter-based distribution grids. To design our framework, we use tools from singular perturbation and Lyapunov theories. Interestingly, we show that stability of the fast dynamics of the power grid depends only on the voltage droop gains of the inverters while, stability of the slow dynamics, depends on both voltage and frequency droop gains. Finally, by leveraging these timescale separation properties, we derive sufficient conditions on the frequency and voltage droop gains of the inverters that warrant stability of the full system. We illustrate our theoretical results through a numerical example on the IEEE 13-bus distribution grid.