On-Line Estimation Assessment of Power Systems Inertia with High Penetration of Renewable Generation

Large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources in power systems is basically motivated by two universally recognized challenges: the need to reduce as far as possible the environmental impact of the massive increase of energy request and the dependency on fossil-fuel. Renewable energy sources are interfaced to the network by means of interfacing power converters which inherently exhibit zero inertia differently from the conventional synchronous generators. This matter jointly to the high level of time variability of the renewable resources involve dramatically frequency changes, recurrent frequency oscillations and high variability of frequency profile in general. The need of a fast estimation of time variability of the power system inertia arises at the aim of predicting critical conditions. Based on the analysis of some actual data of the Italian Transmission Network, in this paper the authors propose an autoregressive model which is able to describe the dynamic evolution of the power system inertia. More specifically, the inertia is modeled as the sum of a periodic component and a noise stochastic process distributed according a non-Gaussian model. The numerical results reported in the last part of the paper, demonstrating the efficiency and precision of estimation of inertia, allow justifying the assumptions of the above modeling.