Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Test of a Low-Cost Synthetic Inertia Controller for Battery Energy Storage System

In the last years, the overall system inertia is decreasing due to the growing amount of energy resources connected to the grid by means of power inverters. As a consequence, reduced levels of inertia can affect the power system stability since slight variations of power generation or load may cause wider frequency deviations and higher rate of change of frequency (RoCoF) values. To mitigate this trouble, end-user distributed energy resources (DERs) interfaced through grid-following inverters, if opportunely controlled, can provide additional inertia. This paper investigated the possibility of improving the control law implemented by a low-cost controller on remotely controllable legacy DERs to provide synthetic inertia (SI) contributions. With this aim, power hardware-in-the-loop simulations were carried out to test the capability of the proposed controller to autonomously measure frequency and RoCoF and provide SI actions by controlling an actual battery energy storage system.