Abstract: Aiming at the deficiency of traditional PID control for the pumped storage units with mechanical delay, a dynamic matrix PID cascade control for pumped storage units is proposed.First, considering the mechanical delay of the hydraulic actuator and output limiting as well as speed limiting of the main servomotor, a mathematical model of the regulation system of the pumped storage unit under small fluctuation is established.Second, based on taking the original PID control of the regulating system as the inner loop control, a dynamic matrix control is introduced as the outer loop control.Then, the PID parameters are optimized by the Beetle Antennae Search Algorithm, and a new dynamic matrix PID cascade control method of pumped storage unit is proposed.Finally, six control strategies such as PID are used to simulate the control system.The results show that the proposed control method can effectively improve the control performance of the pumped storage unit regulation system under no-load frequency disturbance with different mechanical time delays.This study provides a reference for the control of the regulation system of pumped storage units.