The integration of renewable energy sources (RES) into the power system requires an update of the management and control solutions adopted. Regarding frequency regulation, RES, as well as loads, both potentially coupled with energy storage systems, are called to provide a contribution through appropriate regulation services. In this context, this paper proposes a control strategy to enable a unit composed of a wind farm and battery energy storage systems to provide a fast frequency regulation service.

The control is based on the Model Predictive Control technique, while the regulation service is defined according to the technical requirements of the Italian transmission network operator. The approach has also been tested through Hardware-In-the-Loop simulations. Specifically, the tests were conducted by implementing the control algorithm on a Raspberry Pi board that communicates with a real BESS and a real-time simulator that implements a reference power system. The validation results demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed control method, as they show that the designed algorithms can be implemented on low-cost hardware and applied, without computation and communication issues, in a real-world context.