• The proposed hybrid plant—integrating CCPP, BESS, and PV—achieves higher efficiency and lower fuel consumption compared to standalone GT and GT+PV configurations, while reducing PV curtailment. • Simulations using ERCOT market data demonstrate that the hybrid controller maintains optimal dispatch under varying renewable penetration, reducing efficiency loss to only 0.8% over five years. • The low inertia mode enables the plant to provide synchronous inertia during high inverter-based resource (IBR) penetration with minimal efficiency penalty (<0.7%) and limited PV curtailment. • The grid-forming BESS ensures stable islanding and rapid GT synchronization within 5 min, validated through EMT simulations and optimized droop control using Nelder–Mead algorithm. • The hybrid control framework demonstrates resilience and flexibility, positioning hybrid plants as key assets for reliability and renewable integration in high-renewable grids. This paper proposes a hybrid power plant architecture that integrates a combined cycle power plant (CCPP) with a battery energy storage system (BESS) and a solar photovoltaic (PV) array to improve grid reliability, operational flexibility, and fuel efficiency in modern power systems. The gas turbine unit within the CCPP can be operated as a must-run resource to provide continuous rotational inertia, thereby supporting frequency stability in low-inertia grids. An integrated market-oriented control framework is developed, where an optimized day-ahead scheduling model determines the economic dispatch trajectory, and an hour-ahead corrective control layer dynamically adjusts gas turbine and BESS outputs to track the schedule under real-time uncertainties. In addition, the BESS operates in grid-forming mode to provide black-start capability, enabling autonomous energization of the gas turbine and facilitating system restoration following grid outages. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using real ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) market data. From the results, it is evident that the proposed hybrid configuration enhances system resilience, enables efficient market-driven operation, and offers a practical pathway for integrating conventional generation with inverter-based resources in future power systems.
Beck et al. (Wed,) studied this question.