The increasing penetration of renewable energy has led to the large-scale integration of power electronic devices into the power grid. In weakly connected grids, such devices are connected to the grid via voltage source converters (VSCs) using grid-forming (GFM) control strategies. Ideally, the point of common coupling (PCC) with the grid is treated as a purely inductive circuit. However, in weak grids, the resistance-to-inductance ratio (R/X) cannot be ignored, which leads to the power coupling problem between active power (P) and reactive power (Q). This phenomenon impedes the precise control of P and Q, potentially resulting in steady-state power deviations and even system instability. Traditional power-decoupling methods based on virtual inductance (VI) have inherent limitations and fail to achieve complete decoupling between P and Q. To address this issue, this paper first analyzes the influencing factors of power coupling through an established power coupling model. Comparisons between the output voltage and the degree of power coupling demonstrate that power decoupling can be achieved by compensating the output voltage. Consequently, an improved power-decoupling strategy based on apparent power feedforward (APPFF) is proposed. The proposed APPFF method realizes complete P-Q decoupling, with a steady-state reactive power error of less than 1% of the rated value. Compared with the PI-decoupling method, the reactive power overshoot is reduced by about 24%, and no additional active power overshoot is introduced. Compared with the conventional virtual inductance method that only reduces coupling by up to 35%, APPFF eliminates the power coupling fundamentally while retaining the reactive power–voltage droop characteristics and fast dynamic response. By directly compensating the reference voltage to the ideal value using apparent power as the feedforward variable, the proposed method is essentially different from the existing voltage/angle compensation schemes. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed decoupling method are verified under various working conditions, such as different R/X ratios, line resistances and power references, through both Simulink simulations and experimental results.
Zhao et al. (2026) studied this question.