Enabling grid integration of renewables at ICAE 2017 in Cardiff

“Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Systems using Direct Current Technologies” was one of the special sessions of the 9th International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE 2017), held in Cardiff from 21 to 24 August 2017. The session looked at replacing conventional synchronous generation from coal and gas plants, long relied on to keep grids stable, with low-carbon technologies, a shift that had speeded up in recent years to cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit climate change.

Its particular focus was connecting renewable energy to the grid with new direct current technologies. That was the subject of the first of the five large-scale demonstrations of the EU-funded BEST PATHS project, which was developing and testing high-voltage grid technologies for more network capacity and flexibility and more renewable energy in Europe’s mix.

Dr Carlos Ugalde, principal investigator for Cardiff University in the first BEST PATHS demonstration, chaired the session; Cardiff University academics sat on the conference’s local organising committee.

Speakers and neighbouring projects

Besides the latest BEST PATHS work on offshore wind integration, the session covered other large research projects on upgrading transmission networks, such as PROMOTioN and ANGLE DC.

The speakers were Dr Andrea Pitto (RSE S.p.A., Italy) and Dr Max Parker (University of Strathclyde, Scotland), both for BEST PATHS; Dr Willem Leterme (KU Leuven, Belgium) for PROMOTioN; Dr Chao Long (Cardiff University) for ANGLE DC; Prof Bin Li (Tianjin University, China); and Dr Eduardo Prieto (UP Catalonia, Spain).

The conference

ICAE 2017 followed earlier editions in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy, China, South Africa, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates. Its theme was “Energising the Future”, with keynote and invited speeches, plenary sessions, oral presentations and posters on seven topics:

• clean energy conversion technologies;
• energy management, policy, economics and sustainability;
• energy sciences;
• energy storage;
• intelligent energy systems;
• mitigation technologies;
• renewable energy.

A flyer describing the special session was published by the project, and the programme appeared on the ICAE 2017 conference website.

The offshore wind research Ugalde’s Cardiff group contributed is covered on the Demonstration 1 page, and the direct current technology the session was named after is explained under HVDC transmission.