Abstract
This paper presents load frequency control of the 2021 Egyptian power system, which consists of multi-source electrical power generation, namely, a gas and steam combined cycle, and hydro, wind and photovoltaic power stations. The simulation model includes five generating units considering physical constraints such as generation rate constraints (GRC) and the speed governor dead band. It is assumed that a centralized controller is located at the national control center to regulate the frequency of the grid. Four controllers are applied in this research: PID, fractional-order PID (FOPID), non-linear PID (NPID) and non-linear fractional-order PID (NFOPID), to control the system frequency. The design of each controller is conducted based on the novel tunicate swarm algorithm at each operating condition. The novel method is compared to other widely used optimization techniques. The results show that the tunicate swarm NFOPID controller leads the Egyptian power system to a better performance than the other control schemes. This research also presents a comparison between four methods to self-tune the NFOPID controller at each operating condition.