Fine-grained hardware resource optimization and design for FPGA-based real-time simulation of large-scale renewable energy generations

• The hardware resource optimization was conducted for the real-time simulation of renewable energy generations. • The detailed hardware design for the real-time simulation was presented. • The functional hardware modules for the real-time simulation were automatically generated. Real-time simulation of renewable energy generations (REGs) is essential for the development and testing of centralized scheduling controllers, inverter controllers and edge computing devices. The rapid expansion of renewable energy has brought tremendous computational challenges to the real-time simulation of REGs, particularly control system solutions. This study proposes a fine-grained hardware resource optimization and design method for real-time simulation of REG control system based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A hardware resource demand model is built at the arithmetic operation level. The minimum solution time and hardware resource constraints are considered. A detailed hardware design and automatic hardware description language generation method are proposed to rapidly generate the functional hardware modules for the REG control system solution. Real-time simulations of two REG systems integrated with 15 detailed modeling photovoltaic (PV) arrays and 15 wind turbines (WTs) have been conducted on a single FPGA, respectively. The simulation time-step of the PV-REG system is 9 μs and the time-step for the WT-REG system is 10 μs. Compared with the traditional hardware design, the hardware resource utilization has been reduced by 30% approximately. The relative error is less than 0.5% in contrast with the commercial off-line transient simulation software PSCAD/EMTDC.