Nowadays, inverter-based resources are rapidly growing in electric power systems. On the other side, abnormal inverter operations are also occurring more often. Traditionally, inverter PQ capability charts are employed by electric utility companies to ensure safe and reliable operations of inverter-based resources. However, it is found in this paper that existing inverter PQ capability charts do not address the operating characteristics of an inverter correctly, which can result in irregular and unstable inverter operations. In this paper, a novel study is conducted to investigate inverter PQ capability charts, where constraints that are specific to an inverter are considered. It is found in this paper that the inverter PQ capability charts exhibit a unique dynamic nature under uncertain grid conditions. This dynamic nature has not been considered by the industry in managing, designing, and controlling an inverter as well as in developing international standards for inverter-based resources. Via both electromagnetic transient simulation and hardware experimental investigations, it is found that the dynamic PQ capability nature, together with the limitations of the existing control methods, are the underlying causes of many unusual inverter operations that have been reported in the literature.

With the proliferation of large-scale grid-connected wind farms, subsynchronous oscillation (SSO) incidents associated with Type-4 wind turbines (WTs) with a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) have occurred frequently. These incidents have caused severe reliability risks to the power grid. Conventionally, P-Q capability charts are utilized to ensure the safety operating region of a synchronous generator. However, a PMSG WT exhibits completely different and dynamic P-Q capability characteristics due to the difference in energy conversion technique and several critical factors related to the WT power converters. This paper presents a comprehensive dynamic P-Q capability study of a PMSG WT with sufficient and accurate considerations of the WT control and operation in the dq reference frame, its power converter constraints, and grid dynamics. Models of a PMSG WT are first developed based on its control principle in the dq reference frame. Then, algorithms for obtaining the P-Q capability charts of the WT are developed with the considerations of complete WT constraints in different aspects. The study analyzes the root cause of many abnormal operations of grid-connected PMSG WTs, reported in the literature, from the dynamic P-Q capability perspectives. The proposed study is verified via an electromagnetic transient (EMT) model of a grid-connected Type-4 WT.

The increase in penetration levels of inverter-based resources (IBRs) is changing the dynamic performance of power grids of different parts of the world. IBRs are now being more and more integrated into the grid at a single connection point as an IBR plant. Due to the complex nature and dynamicity of each inverter model, it is not realistic to build and analyze full complex models of each inverter in the IBR plant. Moreover, simulating a large plant including detailed models of all the IBRs would require high computing resources as well as a long simulation time. This has been the main issue addressed in the new IEEE Std 2800-2022. This paper proposes a novel approach to model an IBR plant, which can capture the transient nature at the plant level, detailed IBR control at the inverter level, interactions of multiple IBR groups in a plant structure, and a collector system connecting the IBRs to the grid. The IBRs in the plant use a voltage source inverter topology combined with a grid-connected filter. The control structure of the IBR includes a cascaded loop control where an inner current control and outer power control are designed in the dq-reference frame, and a closed-loop phase-locked loop is used for the grid synchronization. The mathematical study is conducted first to develop aggregated plant models considering different operating scenarios of active IBRs in an IBR plant. Then, an electromagnetic transient simulation (EMT) model of the plant is developed to investigate the plant’s dynamic performance under different operating scenarios. The performance of the aggregated plant model is compared with that of a detailed plant model to prove the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The results show that the aggregated EMT simulation model provides almost the same result as the detailed model from the plant perspective while the running time/computation burden is much lower.