North Sea Transnational Grid

North Sea Transnational Grid (NSTG)

Project description

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) foresees that by the end of 2020 there will be circa 40 GW of installed offshore wind energy in Europe. The North Sea Transnational Grid (NSTG) project investigated the best ways of integrating large scale offshore wind power by the construction of a transnational transmission grid in the North Sea.

As wind farms increase in size, and in distance from the shore, it is expected that high voltage DC (HVDC) connections will be one of the key elements in the construction of such grids.

One of the main results of the NSTG project was the development of a novel control strategy – called Distributed Voltage Control (DVC) – for operating voltage-source converters inside a multi-terminal DC (MTDC) network.

Subsequently to the development of the DVC strategy, a scaled-down MTDC network was built and tested in a real-time digital simulator (OPAL-RT) to validate the different models and the controllers developed during the NSTG project, and to demonstrate the ability of the DVC strategy to effectively control the power flow inside the MTDC setup. 

Rodrigo Teixeira Pinto