Enhanced Grid Support of Type-4 Wind Turbines and Battery Energy Storage Using Hybrid Virtual Synchronous Control

India aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070 and increase the share of renewable energy (RE) to 50% of its installed electricity capacity by 2030. This large-scale transition is expected to significantly reduce system inertia due to the displacement of conventional synchronous machines by converter-based resources. To address this challenge, this article proposes a hybrid virtual synchronous control (HVSC) strategy that enables phase-locked loop (PLL)-free grid-forming operation. The control integrates virtual synchronous machine (VSM) dynamics, synthetic torque emulation, and virtual synchronous generator (VSG) functionality to provide autonomous frequency and voltage regulation, maintaining grid support even during severe disturbances. The proposed method is implemented on grid-side converters for both type-4 wind turbine generators (WTGs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS) and evaluated through detailed MATLAB/Simulink simulations. Further validation is carried out using real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing on an OPAL-RT OP4610XG platform with an FPGA-based electrical solver. The experimental results demonstrate that HVSC achieves a faster voltage recovery approximately 45 ms, reduces overshoot by 8.5%, and improves damping compared to conventional control schemes, confirming its robustness and suitability for future low-inertia, RE-dominated power grids.