Wide-Area Measurement System-Based Low Frequency Oscillation Damping Control through Reinforcement Learning

Ensuring the stability of power systems is gaining more attention today than ever before due to the rapid growth of uncertainties in load and increased renewable energy penetration. Lately, wide-area measurement system (WAMS)-based centralized controlling techniques are offering flexibility and more robust control to keep the system stable. WAMS-based controlling techniques, however, face pressing challenges of irregular delays in long-distance communication channels and subsequent responses of equipment to control actions. This paper presents an innovative control strategy for damping down low-frequency oscillations in transmission systems. The method uses a reinforcement learning technique to overcome the challenges of communication delays and other non-linearity in wide-area damping control. It models the traditional problem of oscillation damping control as a novel faster exploration-based deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG-S). An effective reward function is designed to capture necessary features of oscillations enabling timely damping of such oscillations, even under various kinds of uncertainties. A detailed analysis and a systematically designed numerical validation are presented to prove feasibility, scalability, interpretability, and comparative performance of the modelled low-frequency oscillation damping controller. The benefit of the technique is that stability is ensured even when uncertainties of load and generation are on the rise.