Overview of methods for implementing virtual inertia in energy systems with wind and solar power plants

The article aims to review the literature on methods for implementing virtual inertia of wind and solar power plants, which can be used to improve control over them. About 50 scientific articles and reviews selected from  various scientific sources (including IEEE, Web of Science, and Scopus) using the following keywords were examined: wind turbine, wind farm, virtual inertia, microgrid, energy storage systems, supercapacitor, and frequency control. The method of systematic review of specialized sources was applied to provide a well-defined structure for a given field of study through article categorization. Works devoted to reducing the negative impact of renewable energy sources on the energy system were analyzed. The article shows the relevance of developing technologies that enable an improvement in the control capabilities of a power plant using renewable energy sources since their low inertia leads to a decrease in the stability of energy systems. The literature analysis indicates that one of the solutions to increase the stability of such energy systems involves creating virtual inertia in wind turbines and solar panels. However, due to the limited capacity of individual generating units, the effectiveness of implementing virtual inertia may not be sufficient when it is implemented independently in individual units. In this connection, it can be promising to create virtual inertia using a hybrid system comprising a supercapacitor and a generating unit controlled via the virtual synchronous generator method. This review analyzes specialized sources on the methods for implementing virtual inertia in energy systems with wind and solar power plants. It is concluded that no studies of the proposed approach have been conducted or presented to date, and the ideas described in the overview can be confirmed by developing the required algorithms and analyzing the results.

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