Impact of a redox flow battery on the frequency stability of a five-area system integrated with renewable sources

Abstract

Energy storage devices are imperative to damp out the oscillations caused by sudden magnified disturbances occurring in a power system. The presence of a small rating of storage device in each area can alleviate the system oscillations effectively. Therefore, in this work, redox flow batteries (RFBs) have been integrated in each area of a five-area interconnected system for effective load frequency control (LFC). The RFB pumps up the active power into the system quickly to meet the short-time overload; in turn, the efficacy of the LFC in the system is boosted. Despite the presence of the RFB in the power system, a secondary controller is necessary to quench the deviation of frequency and tie-line power caused by the power mismatch between demand and generation. In this perspective, a cascade controller incorporated with a fractional operator (FO) has been endorsed and designed through a nascent selfish herd optimizer technique to evaluate the transient response of the system. Besides this, the unprecedented performance of fractional-order cascade controllers has been compared with one-stage classical controllers with and without a fractional operator. Further, the robustness of the proposed controller has been inspected through subjecting it to a random load in the presence/absence of an RFB and parametric variation. Finally, the proposed model has been simulated in the OPAL-RT-4510 platform to validate the performance of the proposed controller that has produced in the MATLAB environment.