Operation and control of voltage source converters in transmission networks for AC system stability enhancement

The rapid expansion in power transmission for the integration of large-scale renewables is foreseen in the future. This will be complemented by infrastructure reinforcements in the form of series compensation and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) links. These changes will bring forth new operability challenges to grid operators. The stability issues pertained to such reinforcements: potential threat of subsynchronous resonance (SSR) and frequency regulation will be investigated in this thesis. Utilising the existing and future voltage source converters (VSC) based HVDC links to support the AC system by proving ancillary services will be of significant importance in the coming decades. The research work presented in this thesis is aimed to address these challenges, in particular, the technical barriers associated with AC/DC interaction and to propose measures to avoid any potential instability. The main contributions of this research work comprise of four parts, namely, (1) analysis of interactions in-terms of SSR in AC/DC grids, (2) design of SSR damping (SSRD) controllers, (3) experimental demonstration of SSRD schemes, and (4) assessment and improvement of frequency regulation in a wind-thermal bundled AC/DC grid. An VSC-HVDC connected series-compensated AC system resembling the Great Britain (GB) power system has been used as the test network to evaluate the operability challenges pertained to the reinforcements. A state-space representation has been formulated and an eigenvalue analysis has been performed to assess the impact of VSC-HVDC on the torsional modes of nearby connected thermal generation plants. This is followed by damping torque investigation for SSR screening with the results compared against time-domain simulations for testing the accuracy of the small-signal models for SSR studies. A series of SSRD schemes is presented which have been integrated with the VSC-HVDC to damp SSR in the series-compensated GB power system. In addition, this thesis proposes an adaptive SSRD method based on the real-time estimation of the subsynchronous frequency v Abstract component present in series-compensated transmission lines–key information for the optimal design of HVDC subsynchronous damping controllers. Furthermore, the combined AC/DC GB network has been implemented in a real-time digital simulator and connected to a VSCHVDC scaled-down test-rig to performhardware-in-the-loop tests. The efficacy and operational performance of the AC/DC network while providing SSR damping is tested through a series of experiments. In order to provide frequency support in a wind-thermal bundled AC/DC system a dualdroop controlmethod is presented. The scheme binds the system frequency with the DC voltage of an HVDC network. For completeness, the performance of the proposed method is compared to conventional frequency regulation schemes. Sensitivity studies and eigenvalue analyses are conducted to assess the impact that wind penetration and changes in the dual-droop coefficient have on grid stability. Experimental validation is performed using a real-time hardware-inthe- loop test-rig, with simulation and experimental results showing a good agreement and evidencing the superior performance of the proposed frequency support scheme