Review on DC transmission systems for integrating large‐scale offshore wind farms

Abstract

Abstract The exploitation of offshore wind power has increased rapidly in recent years. To gain more wind power energy, offshore wind farms move farther from onshore. A comparison between HVAC and HVDC in terms of reliability, cost and transmission capability shows that HVDC is more suitable for long‐distance, high‐capacity bulk power transmission. However, the HVDC transmission for offshore wind power also faces great challenges because the offshore applications bring critical demands for low volume and low weight for the converters at the offshore side. On the other hand, the new topologies and conversion techniques of power electronic converters expedite many new DC transmission architectures for offshore wind power. Different HVDC architectures by using centralised voltage source converter (VSC), diode rectifier (DR), series‐connected wind turbine converters and all‐DC wind farm based on DC transformers are reviewed and compared. The advantages, challenges and development and application prospects for various DC transmission solutions are discussed.