Tertiary regulation of cascaded run‐of‐the‐river hydropower in the islanded renewable power system considering multi‐timescale dynamics

Abstract

Abstract To enable power supply in rural areas and to exploit clean energy, fully renewable power systems consisting of cascaded run‐of‐the‐river hydropower and volatile energies such as photovoltaic (pv) and wind are built around the world. In islanded operation, the primary and secondary frequency controls, that are hydro governors and automatic generation control (AGC), are responsible for the frequency stability. However, due to limited water storage capacity of run‐of‐the‐river hydropower and river dynamics constraints, without coordination between the cascaded plants, the traditional AGC cannot fully exploit the adjustability of hydropower. When imbalances between the volatile energy and load occur, load shedding can be inevitable. To address this issue, this paper proposes a coordinated tertiary control approach by jointly considering power system dynamics and the river dynamics that couples the cascaded hydropower plants. To unify the multi‐timescale dynamics of the power system and river dynamics to establish a controller that coordinates the cascaded plants, the relation between AGC parameters and turbine discharge is approximated by a polynomial surrogate model. The cascaded plants are coordinated by optimising AGC participation factors in a receding‐horizon manner. Simulation of a real‐life system shows the proposed method significantly reduces load loss under pv volatility.

Keywords

• Rivers, runoff, and streamflow
• Hydroelectric power stations and plants
• Solar power stations and photovoltaic power systems
• Frequency control
• Control of electric power systems
• Optimisation techniques