Coordinated Inertial Response Service Provided by Virtual Power Plants Based on Grid-Forming Converters

Power systems have become more exposed to frequency excursions, emphasising the importance of dynamic ancillary services such as inertial support and fast frequency response to mitigate them. Virtual power plants (VPPs) are seen as suitable candidates for provision of these services and each generation technology within the plant should contribute to the aggregated response according to its own characteristics. However, most VPP studies focus on their steady-state contribution and only a few explore their potential to provide dynamic ancillary services. Moreover, the influence of power reserves (i.e., climatological conditions, state of charge of batteries, etc.) is rarely taken into consideration. This paper presents a centralised controller for a VPP that allows the provision of dynamic ancillary services, considering different generation technologies and their power reserves. The proposed controller helps manage and select the contribution of each individual technology according to the power reserves and the type of energy source. In contrast to existing solutions that depend on continuous adjustment of control parameters, the proposed controller selects the control parameters from predefined subsets that comply with grid codes. The proposed approach is validated by performing numerical simulations.