A New Load Shedding Scheme with Consideration of Distributed Energy Resources Active Power Ramping Capability

Abstract

This paper presents a novel load shedding scheme with consideration of the active power ramping capability of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to address the challenges due to low inertia and diverse types of DERs in microgrids. In the paper, it is demonstrated that due to the small inertia in microgrids, even with sufficient reserve power, the frequency could rapidly drop to a low level and trigger the DERs under frequency protection (thus the total system collapse), if the reserve active power is not ramped up at a sufficient rate. The proposed load shedding scheme addresses this challenge by considering not only the DERs reserve, but also their speed in injecting active power to the system to determine the amount of load should be shed, so that critical frequency thresholds are not violated. The proposed load shedding scheme is tested using a realistic real time hardware-in-the-loop arrangement. The results show that the proposed scheme can correctly detect the cases when the DERs responses are too slow and trigger the required load shedding actions, thus effectively containing the frequency above the critical threshold.