Data-driven Communication and Control Design for Distributed Frequency Regulation with Black-box Inverters

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources into the power grid, with often only black-box models available, challenges long-standing frequency control methods. Most recent works take a decentralized approach without online device coordination via communication. This paper considers both dynamic behavior and communication within secondary frequency control on an intermediate timescale. We develop a distributed data-driven approach that utilizes peer-to-peer communication between inverters to avoid the need for a central control center. To enable a trade off between communication network requirements and control performance, we present a framework to guide communication topology design for secondary frequency regulation. Following design of the inter-agent information exchange scheme, we design a controller that is structured according to the communication topology with a closed-loop stability guarantee. Case studies on the IEEE 39-bus system validate the framework and illustrate the trade-off between communication requirements and control performance that is enabled by our approach.