Impact of Primary Frequency Control of Offshore HVDC Grids on Interarea Modes of Power Systems

Abstract

Offshore high-voltage DC (HVDC) grids are developing as a technically reliable and economical solution to transfer more offshore wind power to onshore power systems. It is also foreseen that the offshore HVDC grids pave the way for offshore wind participation in power systems’ balancing process through frequency support. The primary frequency control mechanism in an HVDC grid can be either centralized using communication links between HVDC terminals or decentralized by the simultaneous use of DC voltage and frequency droop controls. This paper investigates the impact of both types of primary frequency control of offshore HVDC grids on onshore power system dynamics. Parametric presentation of power systems’ electro-mechanical dynamics and HVDC controls is developed to analytically prove that the primary frequency control can improve the damping of interarea modes of onshore power systems. The key findings of the paper include showing that the simultaneous use of frequency and DC voltage droop controls on onshore converters results in an autonomous share of damping torque between onshore power systems even without any participation of offshore wind farms in the frequency control. It is also found that the resulting damping from the frequency control of offshore HVDC is not always reliable as it can be nullified by the power limits of HVDC converters or wind farms. Therefore, using power oscillation damping control in parallel with frequency control is suggested. The analytical findings are verified by simulations on a three-terminal offshore HVDC grid.

Keywords

• analytical studies
• offshore wind
• hvdc grids
• interarea modes
• oscillation damping