Decentralised load frequency control for power systems with communication delays via active disturbance rejection

A decentralised load frequency control (LFC) for multi-area power systems with communication delays is studied. Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) method is adopted to handle the communication delays. First the conventional ADRC is tuned via the bandwidth method and it is shown that the achievable performance for delayed systems is no better than proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. Then a modified ADRC structure is discussed and it is shown that the achievable performance is limited by the controller bandwidth. In order to improve the performance, a method to tune the parameters of ADRC is proposed via the internal model control method. Simulation results show that the proposed method is easy to apply and can achieve good damping performance.