This paper presents a systematic model order reduction (MOR) algorithm based on state relevance applied to an islanded microgrid with electronic power generation. MOR of such islanded microgrids may not benefit, a priori, from the well-established time-scale separation usually applied to conventional power systems, and a systematic MOR is still an open issue. The proposed algorithm uses a balanced realization of the linear system, where state variables may not have physical meaning, to obtain the states’ energies. It then calculates the relevance of the original system states from those energy values. The newly proposed “state-relevance coefficient” should help to choose which states to consider in a reduced model in each study case. Detailed nonlinear simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to find the relevant states to include in the reduced model systematically, even in operation points near the stability limit, where ad-hoc MOR techniques are likely to fail. The performance of the algorithm is illustrated in a system with grid-forming converters in various scenarios but can be easily applied to other systems.

Multi-terminal high-voltage direct current technology based on voltage-source converter stations (VSC-MTDC) is expected to be one of the most important contributors to the future of electric power systems. In fact, among other features, it has already been shown how this technology can contribute to improve transient stability in power systems by the use of supplementary controllers. Along this line, this paper will investigate in detail how these supplementary controllers affect electromechanical oscillations, by means of small-signal stability analysis. The paper analyses two control strategies based on the modulation of active-power injections (P-WAF) and reactive-power injections (Q-WAF) in the VSC stations which were presened in previous work. Both control strategies use global signals of the frequencies of the VSC-MTDC system and they presented significant improvements on transient stability. The paper will provide guidelines for the design of these type of controllers to improve both, large- and small-disturbance angle stability. Small-signal stability analysis (in Matlab) has been compared with non-linear time domain simulation (in PSS/E) to confirm the results using CIGRE Nordic32A benchmark test system with a VSC-MTDC system. The paper analyses the impact of the controller gains and communication latency on electromechanical-oscillation damping. The main conclusion of the paper is that transient-stability-tailored supplementary controllers in VSC-MTDC systems can be tuned to damp inter-area oscillations too, maintaining their effectiveness.