Park controllers regulate and monitor the grid feed-in of renewable energies and thus stabilise the power grid. The devices implement the grid operator's commands or automatically regulate the feed-in of active and reactive power depending on the local grid parameters. If the grid is overloaded, they can regulate the feed-in power.
The Spanish standard sets high requirements
According to EU requirements, a park controller must react to frequency changes within two seconds. The active power feed-in of the generation plant must then be adjusted accordingly. In some EU member states and on the Spanish mainland, however, a reaction time of only 500 milliseconds is expected. On the Spanish islands, park controllers must actually be able to react to frequency changes within only 150 milliseconds. "In order to be able to react to frequency changes so quickly, we had to intervene in the software and increase the sampling rate of our park controller," explains Christoph Fröhlich from Meteocontrol, who took care of the product certification.
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With the energy transition, the number of fluctuating power generators is increasing, which affects grid stability. Therefore, the EU had already issued a regulation in 2016 (2016/631) and defined general grid connection requirements. The EU regulation is implemented and defined country by country. Spain published the specific requirements in 2020. In Spain, however, different rules apply on the mainland (NTS SEPE) than on the islands (NTS SENP). (nhp/mfo)
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