Frequency regulation in a wind–diesel powered microgrid using flywheels and fuel cells

This study presents a control strategy for the frequency regulation in a wind–diesel powered microgrid. With wind as a major energy resource, ensuring reliability and quality of power supplied in the system is a great challenge. To reduce the adverse effects caused by wind's variability, intermittency and uncertainty on the system frequency and improve the performance of diesel generator (DG), a solution is explored that involves the use of two different energy storage technologies. A test system is proposed consisting of a wind farm and a DG, supplemented by hydrogen storage with fuel cell (FC) as a long-term and a flywheel (FW) as a short-term energy storage. During low demand or high wind periods, the surplus energy generated is stored as kinetic energy in the FW and as hydrogen gas after water electrolysis. During periods of low wind speed or increased demand, the FW supplies energy by shedding its rotor speed and hydrogen is converted into electricity through the FC. The effectiveness of adding a short-term and a long-term energy storage in enhancing the robustness of wind–diesel system is demonstrated in this study.