Synthetic inertia to improve frequency stability and how often it is needed

A possible solution to avoid (frequency) instability is to employ so-called “synthetic inertia”, i.e. a contribution of wind power generation with inertia control functionality. The inertia control temporarily provides an amount of additional power in response to significant under-frequency events. Technically, the inertia response from the wind turbines uses the rotational mass in the turbine to provide this temporary power increase. It has been shown in earlier studies that synthetic inertia is able to limit the initial frequency drop after the loss of a large production unit and keep the system stable until the primary frequency control takes over.

In this project, the frequency response of the electric power system has been studied with increasing amount of wind penetration.