A New Control Strategy for a Multi-Bus MV Microgrid Under Unbalanced Conditions

This paper proposes a new control strategy for the islanded operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid. The microgrid consists of several dispatchable electronically-coupled distributed generation (DG) units. Each DG unit supplies a local load which can be unbalanced due to the inclusion of single-phase loads. The proposed control strategy of each DG comprises a proportional resonance (PR) controller with an adjustable resonance frequency, a droop control strategy, and a negative-sequence impedance controller (NSIC). The PR and droop controllers are, respectively, used to regulate the load voltage and share the average power components among the DG units. The NSIC is used to effectively compensate the negative-sequence currents of the unbalanced loads and to improve the performance of the overall microgrid system. Moreover, the NSIC minimizes the negative-sequence currents in the MV lines and thus, improving the power quality of the microgrid. The performance of the proposed control strategy is verified by using digital time-domain simulation studies in the PSCAD/EMTDC software environment.