A Droop Control Design for Multiterminal HVDC of Offshore Wind Farms With Three-Wire Bipolar Transmission Lines

Abstract

Converting existing ac transmission lines to an extended multiterminal three-wire bipolar HVDC system can be considered a cost-effective way to interconnect dispersed offshore wind farms to onshore ac grids instead of building new bipolar HVDC systems. To automatically coordinate between different converters in a multiterminal HVDC (MTDC) system, droop control techniques have been adopted as an effective means without the need for fast communications between units. The droop control design is mainly dependent on the line resistances. This paper shows that the equivalent resistance of a three-wire bipolar system changes based on the operational mode. The modification to droop control design of an MTDC equipped with a three-wire bipolar system is then presented to tackle this resistance variation with the operating condition. Two types of MTDC systems are considered in this work, namely, radial parallel and meshed parallel systems. Different simulation studies have been conducted to validate the results of the presented analysis.