A Dynamic Power Management and Dedicated Control Strategy of a Flexible Multi-Terminal HVDC Grids for Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

Renewable energy systems are becoming more and more popular on the energy market and wind power has particularly shown a great potential in the field. Many wind farms able to produce thousands of MW are expected to be placed offshore away from the mainland. To this end, aiming to produce a significant amount of power and achieve a high performance while being economically competitive, appropriate transmission systems ought to be designed. This paper investigated a flexible Multi-terminal Direct current connection (MTDC), based on the voltage source converter (VSC) technology, connecting one or several offshore wind farms (OWFs) to one or different AC grids. The contribution of this article lies in the fact that it succeeded in setting up a balance between the produced power by the offshore wind farms and the received power by the different AC networks of the multi-terminal VSC-HVDC system, while checking grid constraints to prevent blackout. This was achieved by developing a global a supervision system based on a dynamic power flow management and dedicated control in order to fulfil an optimisation of the modulated architecture of the studied MTDC system. The multi-terminal VSC-HVDC system was simulated using MATLAB software and the provided results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.