IEEE PowerTech Manchester 2017

The School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester hosted the 12th IEEE PES PowerTech Conference from 18 to 22 June 2017. PowerTech is the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s anchor conference in Europe, co-sponsored by the society, and it draws researchers and engineers from industry and academia working across power engineering and the information technology that now runs alongside it.

The 2017 call grouped its topics under four headings. Integration of low-carbon technologies took in distributed generation, storage, microgrids, electric vehicles and smart buildings. System operation and planning covered asset management, power quality, mixed AC-DC systems, market design and forecasting. System control and protection dealt with wide-area monitoring, self-healing grids, power electronics and the stability of future networks. The fourth track was about sensors, communications, cyber security and data.

The mixed AC-DC strand is where the BEST PATHS contribution sat. RSE, Iberdrola and Energinet.dk had a joint paper accepted: “Assessing the impact of Multi-terminal HVDC grids for wind integration on future scenarios of a real-world AC power system using Grid Code compliant open models”. It took a grid-code-compliant model of a multi-terminal DC grid collecting offshore wind power, connected it to a detailed model of the western Danish system, and reported dynamic simulations and N-1 static security assessments for scenarios set in a future operating year.

The word “open” in that title was deliberate.

The paper was part of Demo 1 on HVDC links for offshore wind, whose partners included all three authoring organisations and whose stated aim was to give suppliers other than the large HVDC manufacturers access to open simulation models and a scaled-down test rig; the physics of those links is covered in the HVDC explainer.