A distributed control scheme of microgrids in energy internet and its multi-site implementation

Internet-of-Things concepts are evolving the power systems to the Energy Internet paradigm. Microgrids (MGs), as the basic element in an Energy Internet, are expected to be controlled in a cooperative and flexible manner. This article proposes a novel distributed control scheme for multiagent systems (MASs) governed MGs in future Energy Internet. The control objectives are frequency/voltage restoration and proportional power sharing. The proposed control scheme considers both intra- and inter-MASs interactions, which offers group plug-and-play capability of distributed generators. The stability and communication delay issues in the control framework are analysed. A multisite implementation framework is presented to explain the agent architecture as well as data exchange in local area networks and the cloud server. Then a cyber hardware-in-the-loop experiment is conducted to validate the proposed control method with multisite implementation. The experimental results prove the effectiveness and application potentials of the proposed approach.