Abstract
For achieving the European renewable electricity targets, a significant contribution is foreseen to come from offshore wind energy. Considering the large scale of the future planned offshore wind farms and the increasing distances to shore, grid integration through a transnational DC network is desirable for several reasons. This article investigates a nine-node DC grid connecting three northern European countries — namely UK, The Netherlands and Germany. The power-flow control inside the multi-terminal DC grid based on voltage-source converters is achieved through a novel method, called distributed voltage control (DVC). In this method, an optimal power flow (OPF) is solved in order to minimize the transmission losses in the network. The main contribution of the paper is the utilization of a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the OPF problem while maintaining an N-1 security constraint. After describing main DC network component models, several case studies illustrate the dynamic behavior of the proposed control method.
Highlights
Nowadays, due to sociopolitical and economical reasons, there is an increasing demand for electricity generated via renewable energy sources
An optimal power flow is solved via the genetic algorithm
The Multi-Terminal DC (MTDC) is simulated with the distributed voltage control (DVC) based on the genetic algorithm (GA)-generated direct voltage references
Summary
Due to sociopolitical and economical reasons, there is an increasing demand for electricity generated via renewable energy sources. Different European studies recognize a transnational offshore grid infrastructure as the most efficient way to integrate large amounts of offshore wind power into the national electricity networks [5,8]. These transnational grids could boost the electricity market between countries [9]. For large and distant offshore wind farms, the use of HVDC technology is the most efficient and economical way of transmitting the produced energy to shore [2]. The results of the analyzed case studies are discussed and conclusions are drawn
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