Stabilizing Inverter-Based Transmission Systems: Power hardware-in-the-loop experiments with a megawatt-scale grid-forming inverter

This article presents what the authors believe to be the first experimental verification of the ability of grid-forming (GFM) inverters to stabilize a transmission electric power system that is otherwise unstable. The experiments described here were performed using power hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) simulation to connect a megawatt-scale battery inverter to a real-time electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation of the near-future Maui power system. This allows the dynamic interactions between the inverter and the power system to be observed without putting the real power system at risk. The ability to use the actual inverter hardware removes the need to rely on a computer model approximation of the inverter’s behavior.