Robust moments-matching load frequency control strategy for cyber–physical power system amid communication time delay

False data injection (FDI)-type cyber-threats amid significant communication time delay (CTD) is a challenging issue in modern cyber–physical power systems, affecting its frequency stability and performance. The frequency control problem becomes all the more challenging amid power system nonlinearities and renewable energy penetration. To ensure safe and reliable power supply, a simple and robust load frequency control strategy is vital in practice. Hence, a new uni-parametric analytical proportional–integral–derivative (PID) design strategy is suggested for an interconnected dual-area thermal power plant (TPP) with considerable CTD. This method uses the impulse response of the TPP model to obtain the PID parameters, thereby eliminating the requirement for model-order reduction and Pade’s estimate of CTD, which causes serious performance degradation in existing analytical PID designs. The single tuning parameter λ that dictates the performance-robustness trade-off of the present PID design is determined by minimizing the integral of time-weighted absolute error (ITAE), estimated as a function of area control errors of the dual-area TPP. Performance and robustness of the proposed design is compared with its contemporaries by simulating various practical scenarios such as FDI-type cyber attacks, TPP nonlinearities and integration of renewable energy sources (solar and wind). A maximum sensitivity-based robustness study is performed to demonstrate that the proposed design yields frequency stability despite changes in TPP model parameters.