Due to a rapid increase in the utilization of power converter-based renewable energy sources (RESs), the overall system inertia in an interconnected power system might be significantly reduced, increasing the vulnerability of the interconnected power system to the system instability. To overcome problems caused by the significant reduction in system inertia, this paper proposes a new application of virtual inertia control to improve frequency stability of the interconnected power system due to high penetration level of RESs. The derivative control technique is introduced for higher-level applications of virtual inertia emulation. Thus, the proposed virtual inertia control loop has a second-order characteristic, which provides a simultaneous enabling of damping and inertia emulations into the interconnected power system, enhancing frequency stability and resiliency. System modeling and simulation results are carried out using MATLAB/Simulink^® (R2016b, MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA). Trajectory sensitivities are also performed to analyze the dynamic effects of virtual inertia control’s parameters on the system stability. The effectiveness of the virtual inertia control concept on stability improvement is verified through a multi-area test system with high RESs penetration level for different contingencies.

Renewable energy sources (RESs), such as wind and solar generations, equip inverters to connect to the microgrids. These inverters do not have any rotating mass, thus lowering the overall system inertia. This low system inertia issue could affect the microgrid stability and resiliency in the situation of uncertainties. Today’s microgrids will become unstable if the capacity of RESs become larger and larger, leading to the weakening of microgrid stability and resilience. This paper addresses a new concept of a microgrid control incorporating a virtual inertia system based on the model predictive control (MPC) to emulate virtual inertia into the microgrid control loop, thus stabilizing microgrid frequency during high penetration of RESs. The additional controller of virtual inertia is applied to the microgrid, employing MPC with virtual inertia response. System modeling and simulations are carried out using MATLAB/Simulink^® software. The simulation results confirm the superior robustness and frequency stabilization effect of the proposed MPC-based virtual inertia control in comparison to the fuzzy logic system and conventional virtual inertia control in a system with high integration of RESs. The proposed MPC-based virtual inertia control is able to improve the robustness and frequency stabilization of the microgrid effectively.

Utilizing energy storage systems equipped with virtual/synthetic inertia control has emerged as one of the solutions to solve low inertia issues in power systems with massive penetration of renewables. However, while the aspect regarding the control of the synthetic inertia control has been widely investigated, the optimal placement of synthetic inertia control is rarely investigated. Therefore, the optimal placement of energy storage system with synthetic inertia control based on swarm‐based mean‐variance mapping optimization is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is tested by considering several cases, both single and multiple contingencies. By utilizing the proposed method, the optimal placement of energy storage system equipped with synthetic inertia control could be obtained, in which the resulting frequency response is better compared to randomly placed ones. The proposed method could also be applied by considering multiple contingencies in different locations. Furthermore, the resulting fitness values for different independent optimization repetitions for various study cases are consistent, leading to the efficacy to be applied in the actual power system planning.