Switched distributed load-side frequency regulation for power systems

This paper presents a control scheme for transmission networks by using load-side controllers which cooperate with automatic generation control (AGC) to restore the power system frequency. A switched consensus-based distributed controller is designed for each load bus in the transmission network. Once the frequency exceeds a pre-selected threshold, each load-side controller will start to discover the power imbalance of the system via communicating with neighboring controllers, and meanwhile will work in a frequency regulation mode (FRM) to restore the frequency. After the frequency recovers into a satisfactory region, the load-side controller will switch to a load recovery mode (LRM) and shift their duties to generators. Two cases are considered involving a major load disturbance and wind power forecast error. Simulation results show that the proposed control method has a minimized impact on end-users and improves the system performance significantly compared with the traditional AGC.