An Accurate Reactive Power Sharing Control Strategy for DG Units in a Microgrid

Jinwei He, and Yun Wei Li

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2V4. hjinwei@ualberta.ca, yunwei.li@ece.ualberta.ca

Abstract-- A popular power control and load demand sharing method for distributed generation (DG) units in microgrid is the frequency and voltage droop control. However, in a low voltage microgrid, due to the effects of nontrivial feeder impedance, the conventional droop control is subject to the real and reactive power coupling and steady-state reactive power errors. Furthermore, different microgrid configurations (looped network or radial system) and the different locations of loads make the DG reactive power sharing even more challenging. To improve the power control and sharing accuracy, this paper proposes a control strategy that estimates the reactive power sharing errors of DG units through injecting small real power disturbances. With the estimated reactive power errors, the conventional reactive power droop control can be improved with zero steadystate sharing error, just like the real power sharing through frequency droop control. The proposed method can work in both grid-connected mode and islanding mode and is effective for all types of microgrid configurations and load locations.
Index TermsDistributed generation (DG), microgrid, droop control, real and reactive power sharing.

I. INTRODUCTION Due to the growing concerns on conventional energy costs, energy security and greenhouse gas emissions, an increasing number of distributed energy resource (DER) based distributed generation (DG) units are being connected to power distribution systems. Most of those DG systems are interfaced to the grid through the power electronic converters. With high penetration level of those power electronics based DG units, the stability and power management problems of conventional power distribution systems become more serious. As a result, the microgrid concept has been proposed to facilitate these issues. Comparing to single DG systems, the microgrid provides enhanced performance through the coordinated control among DG interfacing converters. In addition, the microgrid also allows the intentionally islanding operation. Therefore, the microgrid is considered to be an important component for the future smart grid. An indispensable function of microgrid is to achieve desired power management among DG units in islanding operation. Conventionally, the frequency and voltage droop control is adopted without involving any communications among DG units. Although real power can be properly shared using this method, the reactive

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power control is often sensitive to the configuration of the microgrid. Specifically, the nontrivial feeder resistance introduces power coupling during transient and the steady-state reactive power sharing accuracy is affected by the unequal feeder impedances. Additionally, the existence of local loads and the complex network configurations can further aggravate the reactive power sharing problem. To solve the reactive power control issues, a few improved methods have been proposed. In [2], a novel virtual frequency and voltage frame based power control method was presented to reduce the power coupling introduced by feeder resistance. In [3-5], a predominant virtual output inductor was placed at the DG terminal, which reduces the reactive power sharing errors. It is worth mentioning that the reactive sharing error can be further reduced through modified droop slopes [5]. However, the estimation of desired droop slopes is not straightforward. In [6], both the reactive power and the harmonic power can be properly shared with additional harmonic current injection. Although the power sharing problem can be solved with this method, the steady-state distortions always exist in the DG voltages. Therefore, this method may affect the voltage quality of the sensitive loads. In [7], a Q-V dot droop was presented. It can be observed that the reactive power sharing improvement is limited when local loads are considered. To avoid the drawbacks of the aforementioned compensation methods, this paper presents a practical accurate reactive power sharing scheme. The proposed method first identifies the reactive power sharing error through small real power disturbances. Then the accurate reactive power sharing is realized by using an additional intermittent integral term. With this scheme, the reactive power error is significantly reduced, and the improved droop controller will be the same as the conventional droop controller at steady-state. Note that the proposed method is effective for all types of microgrid configurations. Simulation and experimental results are provided to verify the proposed method. II. CONVENTIONAL DROOP CONTROL METHOD A. Operation of Microgrid Fig.1 illustrates a simple microgrid. As shown, the microgrid is composed of two DG units and loads. Each DG unit is interfaced to microgrid with an inverter, and the inverter is connected to the point of common coupling (PCC) through the DG feeder. The microgrid and main grid status is monitored by the distribution system control
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Fig. 1. Illustration of a simple microgrid.

and monitoring center. According to main grid and microgrid operation requirements, the PCC can be connected (grid connected mode) or disconnected (islanding mode) from the main power grid. During gridconnected operation, the real and reactive power references are generated from control and monitoring center and a PI controller [5] can be used to eliminate the steady-state reactive power errors. Therefore, power sharing is not a real issue in grid-connected mode. However, when the microgrid is switched to islanding operation, the load demand of the microgrid must be shared between those two DG units. Hence, the operation of islanding microgrid is the focus of this paper. The conventional real power-frequency droop and reactive power voltage magnitude droop in islanding operation are shown in (1) and (2), respectively:
0

E*

DQ Qrated

DQ

E2 E1

Q2 Q1

Q2

Q1

D P Prated

(1)

Fig. 2. Reactive power flows of two DG units with different feeder reactance.

E E*

DQ Qrated

(2)
E* DQ Qrated X V QLocal

and are the nominal value of DG frequency where and are the rated real and and DG voltage, reactive power, and are the measured real and reactive power after low pass filtering. The droop coefficients and of each DG units are determined according to their respective power ratings and [4, 11]. B. Analysis of Reactive Power Sharing Error The conventional droop control guarantees good real power sharing at steady-state. While the reactive power control is often affected by the voltage drops on DG feeders and the offset of DG local loads. A general voltage drop relationship can be obtained as: (3) where E and are the DG and PCC voltage magnitude, and are the local loads placed at DG output terminals. and are the DG feeder impedance. With (3), the reactive power sharing accuracy can be analyzed accordingly. It can be seen from (3) that the reactive power flow is affected by both feeder resistance and feeder inductance. To make the discussion easier, the feeders of DG unit are

E*

DQ Qrated

E2 E1
Q2Transfer

Q2local
DQ

DQ

Q1

Q2

R /V P

PLocal

X /V Q

Q Local

Fig. 3. Reactive power flows of two DG units with the presence of local load.

assumed to be loss-less inductive feeders at first, as the effects of feeder resistance can be compensated [5, 12]. In addition, the local loads effects are not considered at this stage. As a result, (3) is simplified as:

E V

X /V Q

(4)

P
Q

G
G

DP P G DQ Q

1 S

Q
DQ Q

G
P PAVE

KI S

Fig. 4. Proposed reactive power compensation method.

With (1), (2), and (4), the reactive power sharing ratio can be derived through simple manipulation (5):

Q1 Q2

Dq 1 Dq 2

X1 /V X 2 /V

(5)

where the subscript 1 and 2 denote the parameters of the corresponding DG unit, respectively. Obviously, and here represent the reactive power sharing error. The reactive power sharing error can also be demonstrated using the droop slope curve in Fig.2, where two DG units have same power rating and they should equally share the reactive power. However, as DG unit2 has larger feeder impedance, DG unit2s reactive power Q2 is smaller than Q1. An increased droop slope can alleviate this problem, where the difference between Q1 and Q2 is reduced as shown in the blue droop curve. However, steep slopes may lead to poor stability performance, which makes the microgrid system less reliable [5, 9]. On the other hand, as shown in Fig.1, when local loads are considered for DG unit2, the reactive power sharing performance can also be examined using the droop curves. The curve in Fig. 3 shows the sharing of reactive power with identical DG feeder impedances, and a local load is places at the output of DG unit2. Obviously, the reactive power of DG unit2 can be classified into two parts. means the reactive power flows from DG unit2 to the PCC, and is the reactive power demand at DG output terminals. Although those two DG units have identical feeder impedance, the local load makes a significantly sharing error. offset III. PROPOSED IMPROVED DROOP CONTROL METHOD The aim of this section is to develop a robust control method that can compensate the reactive power sharing error at steady-state. To initialize the compensation, the proposed compensation method adopts a low-bandwidth communication cable between the control and monitoring center and DG units. This communication channel will send out the compensation staring signals, so all DG units can start the compensation at the same time. Considering

that the monitoring center also sends power reference signals in grid connected mode and the synchronization signals during operation mode transition, the proposed method doesnt require any additional hardware cost. Note that only one way communication from the control and monitoring centre to the DG units is needed and the communication between DG units is not necessary for the implementation of this method. The proposed power control strategy is realized through the following two steps: a) Initial power sharing using conventional method. At first, the conventional droop controllers (1) and (2) are adopted for initial load power sharing. During this process, the average real power detection block is used to filter out the real power ripples [8]. In addition, the digital controller identifies the status of compensation starting flag dispatched from the microgrid monitoring center. b) Conventional power sharing error elimination through synchronized compensation.

Once a compensation starting signal is received by the DG unit, the average real power detection block stops before receiving the updating, and the saved data compensation signal is obtained as a reference during compensation. In the compensation process, a combination of real and reactive power is used in frequency droop control (6), and the reactive power error is suppressed by using an additional integration term (7):
0

D P Pref

D Q G Q ref

(6) (7)

E E*

DQ Qref

Ki G P PAVE S

where is the integral gain, which is selected to be the same for all DG units. The unit soft compensation gain G contains an increase ramp at the beginning and a decrease ramp in the end of the compensation, which is used to minimize the power oscillation during compensation.

350

Compensation start
300

DG2

0.2

2mH

0.2

2mH

Fig. 5. Network microgrid in the simulation.

0.3 3mH
Vdc

0.3 3mH

0.3
250

DG3

3mH

I DG1

IDG2

I DG3
200

DG1

Compensation stop

150 0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Time (sec)

Fig. 7. Simulated real power sharing performance in a network microgrid (compensated is activated at 1sec).
250

I DG
V DG

Cf

200

I L (abc )

I DG
150

V DG
PAVE

100

Q
50

VDG_ ref

0 0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Fig. 6. Configuration of the DG unit. Table I. Voltage Control Scheme Parameters

DG Parameters Rated voltage (three-phase line to line) Sampling/switching frequency (Hz) LC filter ) Filter Inductor ( Filter Capacitor ( Rated power ) Values 104V/60Hz 9K/4.5K L:5mH/R:0.2 40uF

Fig. 8. Simulated reactive power sharing performance in a network microgrid (compensated is activated at 1sec).

3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 0.5 0.505 0.51 0.515 0.52 0.525 0.53

250w 150Var 1/400 1/400 1/700 1/600

6 1/35 1

Droop coefficients (Simulation) Droop coefficients (Experiment) Compensation Parameters

Frequency droop Voltage droop Frequency droop Voltage droop Dead-band Integral gain Rated gain G

Fig. 9. Simulated DG currents before compensation.

3 2 1 0

It can be noticed from (6) that the DG unit with reactive power sharing error in step a) can introduce a real power disturbance in step b), as the modified frequency droop controller enables the equal sharing of ). In a the combination power ( microgrid with constant load, the difference between transient real power and the saved average real power reflects the error of the reactive power sharing. Therefore, an integration of the real power difference can be used to eliminate the reactive power sharing error as shown in (7). When the reactive power is shared properly, the real power will go back to its original value with the

-1 -2 -3 3.5 3.505 3.51 3.515 3.52 3.525 3.53

Fig. 10. Simulated DG currents after compensation.

control of (6). Fig. 4 demonstrates the mechanism of the proposed compensation strategy, where the gain G is zero before compensation. When the compensation starts, G will increase slowly to the rated value. After the

350

Compensation start
300

DG2

I DG 1

0.2

0.9mH

0.2 2.5mH

P (W)

IDG2

250

DG1 Compensation stop

200

Fig. 11. Hardware microgrid in the experiment.

150 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5

compensation, G will decrease to zero again, and the droop controller is changed back to conventional mode. It is important to note that there is a dead zone at the input of the reactive power integration block, which is also used to avoid the possible power oscillation during transient. The variation of microgrid load demand, such as the load demand in residential area microgrid [10], is normally slow. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume a constant load condition during the compensation process, which typically takes a few seconds. In addition, the compensation dynamics in a few seconds will also ensure that the compensation performance is not very sensitive to the compensation start flag synchronization accuracy. For instance, even 2 cycles inconsistency of receiving the signal will not cause any noticeable performance difference. Finally, if the compensation function is activated in every few minutes, the proposed method can always maintain an accurate reactive power sharing without affecting power quality. IV. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTS A. Simulation Verifications To verify the correctness of the proposed real and reactive power sharing method, a networked microgrid is established using Matlab/Simulink. As shown in Fig. 5, the simulated microgrid is composed of three identical DG units and two linear loads. The detailed configuration of the DG unit is presented in Fig.6, where an LC filter is placed between the IGBT bridge output and the DG feeders. The DG current and filter capacitor voltage are measured to calculate the real and reactive power. In addition, a multi-loop voltage controller is employed to track the reference voltage [5]. The circuit and control parameters of the DG unit are listed in Table. I. Fig. 7 shows the real power flow of those DG units. Before compensation, the real power is evenly shared with conventional droop method. When the compensation is enabled at 1.0sec, due to the control of real and reactive power combination in (6), there are some disturbances in the real power. However, the real power goes back to the original value at around 3.5 sec. Fig. 8 demonstrates the reactive power flow of the DG units. In contrast to real power flow, there are significant reactive power errors with conventional control method. On the other hand, the proposed method can effectively tune the reactive power sharing error to almost zero. And

Time (sec)

Fig. 12. Experimental real power sharing performance (with 0.2 , 0.8mH DG1 feeder impedance).
250

200

150

100

50

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Fig. 13. Experimental real power sharing performance (with 0.2 , 0.8mH DG1 feeder impedance).
350

300

250

200

150

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Fig. 14. Experimental real power sharing performance (bypass DG1 feeder impedance).
250

200

150

100

50

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Fig. 15. Experimental real power sharing performance (bypass DG1 feeder impedance).

there is no obvious reactive power oscillation during the compensation. Fig. 9 and Fig. 10 show the associated DG currents. With conventional droop control method, the magnitude and phase of DG currents are not the same as shown in Fig. 9. Consistent with the power sharing analysis, the DG currents in Fig. 10 are almost identical after compensation. B. Experimental Verifications Experiments are also conducted on a three-phase double-DG unit based laboratory microgrid prototype. The hardware parameters of the DG units are selected to be the same as those in the simulation. First, as shown in Fig.11, two DG units are connected to a load with mismatched feeder impedances. The microgrid is originally operated with conventional droop control method. It can be seen that the real power sharing in Fig. 12 is accurate while DG unit1 shares more reactive power as illustrated in Fig. 13, due to the effects of unequal feeder voltage drops. When the proposed accurate power control is enabled at 0.5sec, the reactive power sharing accuracy in Fig. 13 is significantly improved. In addition, the stop of the proposed compensation will not cause any obvious power oscillation. To further prove the effectiveness of the compensation method, similar experiments are also conducted when the feeder impedance of DG unit1 is reduced to zero. As can be seen from Fig. 14 and Fig. 15, with conventional control, the real power is equally shared while the majority of the reactive power demand is provided by DG1. Once again, an accurate reactive sharing can be achieved with the proposed compensation method. V. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, an improved reactive power sharing method in microgrid was discussed. The presented method adopts real power disturbance to identify the errors of reactive power sharing and then compensates the errors using a slow integral term. The compensation strategy also uses a low-bandwidth flag signal from the control and monitoring centre to activate the compensation, which can achieve accurate power sharing without any physical communications among DG units. In addition, the proposed method is not sensitive to microgrid configurations, which is especially suitable for a complex networked microgrid. REFERENCES
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