Renewable Power Generation Conference: Best Paths goes to China

Wind energy covered around 5% of the United Kingdom’s yearly electricity needs in 2017 and was expected to reach 10% by 2020. The larger its contribution, the more urgent it becomes to use the full potential of remote offshore wind farms.

The most efficient way to carry electricity over long distances, and so to connect offshore wind, is High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC), which is particularly well suited to subsea transmission.

BEST PATHS partners were studying the electrical interactions between HVDC converters and wind turbine converters, with the aim of de-risking HVDC for connecting offshore wind farms to the grid. Two of the main results were an open-access simulation toolbox and a laboratory-scale demonstrator for integrating offshore wind farms through multi-terminal HVDC grids.

Dr Sheng Wang of Cardiff University presented the toolbox in mid-October 2017 at the 6th IET Renewable Power Generation Conference in Wuhan, China.

The conference is a forum for the latest research on renewable power generation technology and the development of renewable sources, covering wind and photovoltaic technology, energy storage for renewables, power system integration, and policy and market options for power system flexibility.

The toolbox drew interest from the academics and industry representatives present, who saw it as a possible contribution to bringing more renewables into national energy mixes. The presentation on the toolbox was published by the project.

The toolbox came out of the offshore wind demonstration covered on the Demonstration 1 page; its laboratory counterpart ran at the National Smart Grid Laboratory in Trondheim, as reported from the May 2017 Trondheim workshop.