Consensus based synchronization of clocks to diminish the effect of clock drifts in microgrids

Inverter based microgrids implemented with more than one Grid Forming source can suffer of, so called, clock drifts when inaccurate time measurement is present. Considering that the main cause of this problem is the, slightly, different value of the time register at each clock, the synchronization approach seems like a natural choice even when additional hardware for the implementation of the sources might be required. We explore several alternatives for improving synchronization, understood as the clocks sharing the same value for their respective time register. This leads to propose a consensus based algorithm for synchronization with relatively low communication and computation requirements. The analysis is complemented with simulation examples to show the main characteristic of the different algorithms. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.