Tutorial: Grid-Following Inverter for Electrical Power Grid
It offers an incremental educational resource for power system engineers and students to bridge the gap between control design and simulation in modern power grids.
This tutorial addresses the lack of introductory material on grid-following inverters by providing a circuit-theoretic introduction to their modeling and simulation from first principles, enabling readers to understand and implement these systems in electromagnetic transient simulation platforms.
The growing use of inverter-based resources in modern power systems has made grid-following inverters a central topic in power-system modeling, control, and simulation. Despite their widespread deployment, introductory material that explains grid-following inverter operation from first principles and connects control design to time-domain simulation remains limited. To address this need, this tutorial presents a circuit-theoretic introduction to the modeling and simulation of a grid- following inverter connected to an electrical power grid. We describe the inverter synchronization with the grid (PLL), power control, and current control structure and show how these elements can be represented within an electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation framework using companion model-based formulations similar to those used in circuit simulators such as SPICE and Cadence. In this tutorial, we use the grid-following inverter as the primary example to illustrate how its governing equations, control loops, and network interface can be formulated and simulated from first principles. By the end of the document, readers should gain a clear introductory understanding of how to model and simulate a grid-following inverter in an EMT platform.