The increasing presence of solar energy sources has radically transformed the continental electrical network. While solar panels affect the grid in a distributed manner, and an individual device has negligible weight, the presence of a large population engaged in energy production can affect the overall network dynamics. While this effect might in some scenarios be disruptive, solar panels can offer the potential for frequency regulation, if their power output is to be controlled. In this work, we present models for the aggregation of a heterogeneous population of solar panels connected to the electrical grid. The electrical network frequency is modeled centrally: the model accounts for primary frequency control, and its inertia is a function of the penetration of PV generation. We study how features of the PV population affect the overall frequency signal. In particular, we investigate scenarios of power production (infeed) incidents: we simulate sudden generation losses and study the corresponding frequency response at varying levels of renewable penetration. Simulations show good performance of the aggregated models when compared with the physical system and quantitatively indicate that population heterogeneity is a desirable feature to avoid load shedding. We furthermore put forward a control architecture to regulate the power generation of the PV population: this intentionally simple architecture is aligned with primary control and is tailored to a decentralized implementation. We show that the control scheme can avoid load shedding, despite increasing penetration of solar generation, thus contributing to network resilience.
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