A novel NERC compliant automatic generation control in multi-area power systems in the presence of renewable-energy resources

In this paper, a novel automatic generation control for a multi-area power system is developed. The proposed controller is based on the Immune-Reinforcement-Learning Algorithm and is capable of real-time adjustment to comply with North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) control performance standards as well as decreasing the generators' oscillations. High-renewable penetration, such as wind power, reduces the total inertia of the system which makes the system unable to recover from perturbation causing deterioration in the control performance standards. Because of the intermittency of the renewables, constant gain controllers do not perform well and tend to violate the NERC standards. The proposed algorithm acts in real time and adapts with changes in the renewable power as well as changes in the load to always comply with the standards while smoothly running the generators to reduce wear and tear. The proposed controller is implemented on a four-area power system and compared to different fixed value cases.