An Affordable Sophisticated Frequency Control Ancillary Services for Australian National Electricity Market System Considering Industry and Infrastructure Challenges

This industry-oriented paper proposes a novel sophisticated frequency control and its ancillary services framework for the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) power system considering the special design of its current automatic generation control system, which does not involve interconnectors between different power regions, resulting in technical challenges for both stability and security of the system. The proposed new method converts the NEM centralized frequency control system to a fully decentralized one with virtual consideration of interconnectors' power, thus the stability and security would be improved, and high fluctuations in interchanged power would be smoothed without extra costs of infrastructure and procurement of frequency control ancillary reserves (FCASs). The novel idea is to model the interconnectors' power deviation as unknown input to the operator in each power region, like load disturbances and renewable power variations, using dynamic observation techniques, for enabling the proposed method capabilities. The method is theoretically verified that it can enhance stability and security and stabilize both local frequencies and power exchanges. The experiment results confirm the capability of the proposed method for the NEM system and its superiority over the existing adopted approaches in industries.