HVDC links between North Africa and Europe: Impacts and benefits on the dynamic performance of the European system

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Mokhtar Benasla, Tayeb Allaoui, Mostefa Brahami, Mouloud Denai, and Vijay K. Sood, ‘HVDC links between North Africa and Europe: Impacts and benefits on the dynamic performance of the European system’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, November 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 20 November 2018. The published version is available online at doi: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.10.075. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This manuscript version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.In the last decade, there have been several initiatives for the deployment of cross-Mediterranean HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) links to enable the transmission of electrical power from renewable energy sources between North Africa and Europe. These initiatives were mainly driven by the potential economic, environmental and technical benefits of these HVDC interconnections. In previous studies on these projects, some technical aspects of critical importance have not been addressed or studied in sufficient detail. One of these key aspects relates to the impact and possible benefit of these HVDC links on the dynamic performance of the European system which is the major focus of this paper. Several issues relating to the dynamic performance of the system are addressed here. Based on the experience gained from existing AC/DC projects around the world, this paper shows that the HVDC links between North Africa and Europe can greatly improve the dynamic performance of the European system especially in the southern regions. In addition, some challenges on the operation and control of these HVDC links are highlighted and solutions to overcome these challenges are proposed. This review paper, therefore, serves as a preliminary study for further detailed investigation of specific impacts or benefits of these interconnections on the overall performance of the European system.Peer reviewe

A Wide Area Hierarchical Voltage Control for Systems with High Wind Penetration and an HVDC Overlay

The modern power grid is undergoing a dramatic revolution. On the generation side, renewable resources are replacing fossil fuel in powering the system. On the transmission side, an AC-DC hybrid network has become increasingly popular to help reduce the transportation cost of electricity. Wind power, as one of the environmental friendly renewable resources, has taken a larger and larger share of the generation market. Due to the remote locations of wind plants, an HVDC overlay turns out to be attractive for transporting wind energy due to its superiority in long distance transmission of electricity. While reducing environmental concern, the increasing utilization of wind energy forces the power system to operate under a tighter operating margin. The limited reactive capability of wind turbines is insufficient to provide adequate voltage support under stressed system conditions. Moreover, the volatility of wind further aggravates the problem as it brings uncertainty to the available reactive resources and can cause undesirable voltage behavior in the system. The power electronics of the HVDC overlay may also destabilize the gird under abnormal voltage conditions. Such limitations of wind generation have undermined system security and made the power grid more vulnerable to disturbances. This dissertation proposes a Hierarchical Voltage Control (HVC) methodology to optimize the reactive reserve of a power system with high levels of wind penetration. The proposed control architecture consists of three layers. A tertiary Optimal Power Flow computes references for pilot bus voltages. Secondary voltage scheduling adjusts primary control variables to achieve the desired set points. The three levels of the proposed HVC scheme coordinate to optimize the voltage profile of the system and enhance system security. The proposed HVC is tested on an equivalent Western Electricity Coordinated Council (WECC) system modified by a multi-terminal HVDC overlay. The effectiveness of the proposed HVC is validated under a wide range of operating conditions. The capability to manage a future AC/DC hybrid network is studied to allow even higher levels of wind

System configuration, fault detection, location, isolation and restoration: a review on LVDC Microgrid protections

Low voltage direct current (LVDC) distribution has gained the significant interest of research due to the advancements in power conversion technologies. However, the use of converters has given rise to several technical issues regarding their protections and controls of such devices under faulty conditions. Post-fault behaviour of converter-fed LVDC system involves both active converter control and passive circuit transient of similar time scale, which makes the protection for LVDC distribution significantly different and more challenging than low voltage AC. These protection and operational issues have handicapped the practical applications of DC distribution. This paper presents state-of-the-art protection schemes developed for DC Microgrids. With a close look at practical limitations such as the dependency on modelling accuracy, requirement on communications and so forth, a comprehensive evaluation is carried out on those system approaches in terms of system configurations， fault detection, location, isolation and restoration

Coordinated Damping Control Design for Power System With Multiple Virtual Synchronous Generators Based on Prony Method

With more renewables integrated into power grids, the systems are being transformed into low inertia power electronic dominated systems. In this situation, the virtual synchronous generator (VSG) control strategy was proposed to deal with insufficient inertia challenge caused by the reduction of synchronous generation. However, as the VSG control method emulates the dynamic behavior of traditional synchronous machines, the interaction between multiple VSG controllers and synchronous generators (SGs) may cause low-frequency oscillation similar to that caused by the interaction between multiple SGs. This paper reveals that the system low-frequency oscillatory modes are affected by multiple VSGs. Then Prony analysis is utilized to extract the system mode information which will be subsequently used for VSG controller design, and a decentralized sequential coordinated method is proposed to design the supplementary damping controller (SDC) for multiple VSGs. The system low-frequency oscillation is first analyzed based on a modified two-area system with a linearized state-space model, and a further case study based on a revised New England 10-machine 39-bus system is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coordinated method for multiple VSGs