Determination of the Required Power Response of Inverters to Provide Fast Frequency Support in Power Systems with Low Synchronous Inertia

Abstract

The decommissioning of conventional power plants and the installation of inverter-based renewable energy technologies decrease the overall power system inertia, increasing the rate of change of frequency of a system (RoCoF). These expected high values of RoCoF shorten the time response needed before load shedding or generation curtailment takes place. In a future scenario where renewables are predominant in power systems, the ability of synchronous machines to meet such conditions is uncertain in terms of capacity and time response. The implementation of fast power reserve and synthetic inertia from inverter-based sources was assessed through the simulation of two scenarios with different grid sizes and primary reserve responses. As main results it was obtained that the full activation time for a fast power reserve with penetration above 80% of inverter-based generation would need to be 100 ms or less for imbalances up to 40%, regardless of the synchronous response and grid size, meaning that the current frequency measurement techniques and the time for fast power reserve deployment would not ensure system stability under high unbalanced conditions. At less-unbalanced conditions, the grid in the European scale was found to become critical with imbalances starting at 3% and a non-synchronous share of 60%.