Abstract The depletion of fossil fuels and the rising demand for electricity are driving the global shift toward renewable energy sources (RES). The primary goal of incorporating RES into the conventional smart grid is to establish a more ecological and eco-friendly energy system. However, due to their lower system inertia, RESs struggle to effectively respond to fluctuations in load demand. This study investigates how a Dual Loop LADRC-FOPIDN-(1 + TD) controller can improve frequency regulation in a multi-area deregulated electricity system while taking RES’s intermittent nature into account. By integrating LADRC with a cascade controller, the proposed approach delivers improved transient performance over selected benchmark controllers (LADRC, FOPIDN, FOPIDN-(1 + TD)) under the tested scenarios. Furthermore, an enhanced Quasi Opposition Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (QOAOA) is employed to optimize controller parameters for improved efficiency. Simulation results highlight its strong adaptability to specific uncertainties modeled in this study, such as RES intermittency, load fluctuations, and delay effects, ensuring grid stability. Moreover, this study addresses the use of electric vehicles (EVs) to regulate frequencies in a hybrid power system under the conditions of real-time load demand variations. Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are incorporated in every system region as a measure to reduce undesirable transient components on load frequency and power sharing. PEVs absorb unnecessary electrical energy and give it back to the grid when needed, which offers useful grid support, particularly within RES-dominated networks. The proposed controller is tested on a better IEEE-39 bus system with real-time load variation and variability of RES, through data provided by BSES Rajdhani Power Limited (BRPL), Delhi. Lastly, OPAL-RT hardware is used to run a real-time simulation environment, which targets the integration of real hardware with a virtual test environment, to test the effectiveness and the robustness of the controller. Finally, the MATLAB simulation results are compared with OPAL-RT hardware results.
Ranjan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.