Summary
This paper presents the combined voltage and frequency control of three‐area multi‐source interconnected power systems, having thermal‐solar thermal power plant, thermal‐wind and hydrothermal‐geothermal power plants. A maiden attempt has been made to incorporate one of the energy storage devices called redox flow battery (RFB) in all areas. Appropriate system non‐linearity constraints are considered for both thermal and hydro plants. A new cascade controller called cascade fractional‐order PD with filter and fractional‐order proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) with filter (CFOPDN‐FOPIDN) is proposed as a secondary controller in the unified automatic load frequency control (ALFC) and automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system. A novel optimization algorithm called artificial flora algorithm is used to optimize the controller parameters. From the observation of the system dynamic responses, it reveals that the CFOPDN‐FOPIDN controller is superior to the FOPID, PIDN and PI controllers. The unified ALFC‐AVR study exhibits that the AVR loop enhances the system dynamics considerably. It is observed that the system oscillations are substantially reduced along with the peak deviation and settling time in the presence of RFB. Moreover, the combined frequency deviation and area control error as an input signal to the RFB outperforms the individual one. The system performance improves with an increase in the RFB gain value. Furthermore, it is divulged that a larger frequency deviation leads to a faster rate of change of frequency. Eventually, the sensitivity analysis reveals the sturdiness of the proposed controller.