THE OPPORTUNITY OF GRID-FORMING CONVERTERS IN THE WIDE-AREA CONTROL OF POWER SYSTEMS

In conventional wide-area control schemes, the actuators are typically the power system stabilizers of synchronous machines. The control action, in this case, can not directly act upon the power-angle relationship of the machines. In this context, the gridforming control for power converters offers the opportunity of an effective wide-area control: grid-forming converters present in fact a direct formulation of the power-angle control law, and therefore the possibility of directly acting upon it. The paper proposes an extension of the grid-forming control, including a specific additional control action based on a remote frequency signal. The proposed concept is proved with a simple representative system, and then demonstrated with two application cases, the standard IEEE 39-bus system and the European power system. The results indicate that the proposed participation of grid-forming converters in the wide-area control leads to a considerable improvement of the dynamic characteristics of the system.