With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources in the power system, the power electronic inverters are widely used to interface with the grid, which will reduce the inertia of the power system. This study proposes ancillary inertial service from single-phase rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) based inverter to the grid. The inertia emulation control technique transforms the behaviour of inverter like a synchronous generator under power imbalances. A hybrid energy storage system consisting of battery and supercapacitor (SC) has been connected at the DC bus to take care of the variability in PV output power and load fluctuations. The SC absorbs/injects the fast-varying power and provides the inertial response to arrest the frequency deviation and battery charges/discharges to bring back the frequency to the nominal value. Real-time simulation is carried out to test the system behaviour for different operating conditions using OPAL-RT 5700. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2020