Robust Design of Delay-Resilient Wide-Area Damping Controllers in Power Systems Based on Hybrid RES–ESS Actuators and 5G-Enabled PMU Streams

With the increasing deployment of renewable energy sources (RES) and energy storage systems (ESS), these units, in addition to their primary roles of generation and storage, offer significant potential for damping inter-area and low-frequency oscillations in modern power systems. By exploiting the fast dynamics of inverter-based RES and the effective inertia provided by storage systems, they can actively contribute to enhancing transient stability and improving oscillation damping. This paper proposes a robust design of delay-resilient wide-area damping controllers (WADCs) that are directly integrated into the control layer of hybrid RES–ESS units. The controller utilizes 5G-enabled phasor measurement unit (PMU) streams, ensuring reliable and low-latency wide-area signals to improve resiliency against variable delays and packet losses. The proposed structure is based on a classical power oscillation damper (POD) with adaptive gain scheduling, enabling dynamic adjustment to different delay scenarios and operating conditions. To determine the optimal parameters of the WADC, the Coronavirus Metamorphosis Optimization Algorithm (CMOA) is employed. Inspired by the transformation and mutation processes of viral evolution, CMOA ensures efficient global and local search balance and provides robust convergence under uncertainty. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is validated on two benchmark test systems: the IEEE six-machine, three-area system for fundamental analysis and the IEEE 39-bus New England system for large-scale validation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed WADC effectively damps inter-area oscillations, reduces settling time, and maintains robust performance under varying delays (100–500 ms) and renewable variability. In the 6-machine system, the dominant inter-area mode shifted from an unstable eigenvalue (− 1.43% damping at 0.501 Hz) to a stable one with over 41% damping (0.652 Hz), while ITSE and ISE were reduced by more than 90%. In the 10-machine New England system, three poorly damped inter-area modes (worst case − 5.96% damping) were stabilized with damping ratios near 4.5%, alongside a reduction of error indices by more than 95%.