Distributed Event-Triggered Control of District Cooling Systems for the Frequency Regulation Service of Islanded Microgrids With Quantization Communication

District Cooling System (DCS), one of the demand-side loads with significant regulation flexibility, is a promising resource for providing frequency regulation services for islanded microgrids (MGs). However, existing control methods for DCSs have huge communication burdens due to the continuous communication mode and extensive communication data. Besides, fair power participation among DCSs is not ensured. This may worsen the frequency performance because some DCSs prematurely exit the regulation service due to excessive use of their regulation capacities. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed event-triggered control strategy with quantization communication for DCSs to provide frequency regulation service with reduced communication burdens while guaranteeing fair power participation and user comfort requirements. In the proposed strategy, the event-triggered mechanism only allows each DCS to communicate with its neighbors at triggering events, which can reduce communication frequency. The quantization communication technology only transmits quantized data among DCSs, allowing less communication data. Additionally, fair power participation can be achieved by converging the power-adjusting ratios of DCSs to the reference. Furthermore, the stability of the proposed control strategy is strictly proven, and the proposed communication strategy is free from Zeno behavior. Numerical results on the modified IEEE 34-bus system validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.