Utilizing controlled plug-in electric vehicles to improve hybrid power grid frequency regulation considering high renewable energy penetration

•Using Controlled Plug-In Electric Vehicles to Improve Hybrid Power Grid Frequency Regulation.•Improving Hybrid Power Grid Frequency Regulation Considering High Renewable Energy Penetration.•Developing an Effective Optimizer Called Leader Manta Ray Foraging Optimization.•Validating the proposed FO-(PD-PI) controller and comparing its performance with other controllers.•The proposed controller is a viable and effective control scheme for modern power grids. This study proposes an incorporated strategy based on energy storage systems (ESSs) like plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) with load frequency control (LFC) to enhance the frequency stability during high penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs). Furthermore, an innovative-cascaded controller is used in the LFC loop, and PEVs are considered in the two identical areas' multi-source power grids. The proposed control structure is based on using two terms, the first term is the fractional-order-proportional-derivative (FOPD), and the second cascaded term is a fractional-order-proportional-integral (FOPI) to form the cascaded (FO-(PD-PI)) controller. Additionally, the gains of the proposed controller are well designed, utilizing an improved version of the manta ray foraging optimization algorithm (MRFO) labeled as leader MRFO (LMRFO). The effectiveness of the proposed FO-(PD-PI) controller based on the LMFRO algorithm is validated by comparing its performance with that of other control approaches such as (i.e., the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, the tilt-integral-derivative (TID) controller, and the fractional-order-PID (FOPID) controller) based on different optimizers. Different load perturbation patterns, a high penetration level of RESs, and the communication delay time are broadly implemented for ensuring the superiority of the proposed controller in penalizing the power grid perturbations. Furthermore, for validating the efficiency of the proposed controller, an IEEE 39 bus is used. As a result, the proposed integrated strategy is a viable and effective control scheme for modern power grids with high-RESs penetration.