• Energy Research

International audience; The wind energy, as a kind of renewable energy resources, has the potential to replace traditional fossil fuels. However, its intermittent power output can incur frequency instability due to the instantaneous unbalance between power generation and load demand. To smooth the penetration of wind energy, this paper presents a robust cooperative load frequency control (LFC) strategy for multi-area power systems, which is a hierarchical control approach. For the low-level wind turbine control, this paper adopts model predictive control (MPC) method to achieve the rated wind power tracking. In the meantime, an improved event-triggered scheme (ETS) considering multiple historic released signals is employed to relieve the computational burden of MPC. For the high-level cooperative LFC, this paper incorporates the robust performance index in the control synthesis to suppress the impact of intermittent wind power on frequency stability. In addition, to address the underlying shift of the steady-state operating point caused by the intermittent wind power supply, this paper improves the commonly used small-signal LFC model by adding an uncertain matrix, which reasonably explains the possible change of system parameters and extends the applicability of the traditional LFC model. Simulations are done on a four-area power system, and the results verify the efficacy of the presented event-triggered scheme and the robust cooperative LFC approach. Note to Practitioners —To promote the penetration of wind energy into power systems, this work explores a robust cooperative LFC approach under multi-agent structure to ensure the stability of the system, aiming at extending the applicability of existing approaches. The proposed approach is hierarchical. At the rated wind power tracking level, the MPC is employed to handle constraints associated with actuating devices, such as heterogeneous convertors. Simultaneously, an improved ETS considering multiple historic triggered signals is integrated in the MPC to reduce the computational burden. At the power system level, the robust performance index is incorporated in the control design to smooth the impacts of intermittent wind power on frequency stability. Additionally, the study accounts for the potential shift of the steady-state operating point and improves the traditional small-signal LFC model by adding an uncertain matrix, which can better explain the variation of system parameters and is more applicable in practical power system engineering. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed robust cooperative LFC approach can effectively maintain the system frequency within the admissible range under the high penetration of wind energy, whereas the traditional PI controller falls short in this regard.