Operation and Control of a DC-Grid Offshore Wind Farm Under DC Transmission System Faults

Abstract

So far, all existing offshore wind farms have an ac collection system, and the collected power in the offshore wind farm is sent to an onshore ac grid through high-voltage ac (HVAC) or DC (HVDC) transmission lines. However, future offshore wind farms may use dc also for power collection. Consequently, the protection and control strategies of dc systems need to be established. This paper studies a dc-grid offshore wind farm, where the wind power collection system and power transmission system adopt dc technology. In this paper, the redundancy of the HVDC transmission system under faults is studied, and a fault ridethrough strategy for the dc-grid offshore wind farm is proposed. The proposed strategy can effectively minimize the impacts of the power transmission system disturbance on the offshore wind farm, and on the ac grid. A dc-grid offshore wind farm example is simulated with PSCAD/EMTDC, and the results validate the feasibility of the presented redundancy configuration and operation approach, and the fault ridethrough control strategy.