HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

DIgSILENT PowerFactory

Abstract
This paper discusses the modelling of an
HVDC link for a 400 MW offshore wind farm
consisting of DFIG wind turbines. Voltage
source converters (VSC) are used for the
HVDC connection. The paper covers load
flow calculation and time-domain simulation
(RMS and EMT).

Content

This document presents a model of a high

voltage direct current (HVDC) system. Simulations are performed and the results are discussed. The simulations show the behaviour
of the HVDC system in the case of onshore
and offshore faults.

Base Model

In the Base Case of the HVDC Offshore

Wind Farm example, a model of an offshore wind farm is represented. The wind
farm consists of 80 wind turbines connected
via a voltage source converter high voltage
direct current system (VSC HVDC, Figure
5) to a 380 kV onshore transmission network. Each wind turbine has a nominal
active power of 5 MW. The machines are
equipped with doubly-fed induction generators (DFIG, wind turbine type 3). Only 10
of the 80 wind turbines are modelled as individual machines (these are represented in
DIgSILENT GmbH, Heinrich-Hertz-Str. 9, 72810
Gomaringen, Germany, www.digsilent.de

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the Detailed Feeder single line diagram).

The remaining 70 turbines are aggregated
into four DFIG models: three models representing 20 parallel machines and one representing 10 parallel machines. This approach offers a compromise where detailed
studies of the explicitly modelled feeder can
be carried out but where the overall the size
of the system is reduced. The wind farm
model was built using a Template of a wind
turbine model from PowerFactorys global library. The template includes models of the
main elements of the wind turbine (Generator and Transformer), as well as the additional dynamic models which represent the
controllers, PLL etc. during dynamic RMS
and EMT simulations. The asynchronous
generator model used for the DFIG contains
the simulation equations for the frequency
converter used on the rotor. Hence only one
connection is needed to connect the generator to the network (the frequency converter
is connected internally). The HVDC link was
modelled using the VSC element in PowerFactory . The control structure is of a generic
type. A description of the control structure
used is given in chapter 4. A short description of the usage of the HVDC system in
other projects is given in Section 5. The
Base Case has been configured for a load
flow calculation. For all other kinds of calculation or simulation, please refer to the other
Study Cases (see section 3).

Calculations and Simulations

The following sections will describe the results which can be obtained using the dif-

HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

ferent study cases of the project HVDC Offshore Wind Farm.
To run time-domain simulations as described
in Section 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 the RMS/EMT
Simulation toolbox should be selected as
shown in Figure 1. A simulation has to be initialised first. The required dialogue is accessible via the button Calculate Initial Conditions ( ). For the study cases described in
the following subsections, all settings in the
project are already correctly configured. By
pressing Execute the simulation initialises.
The simulation can then be started by pressing the Start Simulation button ( ) and executing the command. The results are visible
after the simulation has finished.

3.1

Short-Circuit Calculation

In the study case 02 Short Circuit Calculation of the HVDC Offshore Wind Farm
example the short-circuit calculation is presented. Please press the Calculate ShortCircuit button ( ) to execute the shortcircuit calculation.
Since the IEC 60909 standard does not reflect the fault behaviour of modern wind turbines, the DIgSILENT Complete Method is
used to calculate their short-circuit contributions. The quantities Ik00 , Ib , Ith etc. are
calculated, which express the stress on the
grid elements. In this study case, settings
have been selected for the Complete Method
short-circuit calculation which are similar to
those of IEC 60909 (c = 1.1 for max. shortcircuit currents; loads, capacitances of lines,
magnetizing currents of transformers, shunt
elements and filters are ignored in the positive sequence). In addition, settings have
been applied which take the short-circuit
contribution of the wind turbines into account
accurately. Accuracy is achieved by using
current iteration to calculate the transient
short-circuit current Ik0 . In this current iteration the additional reactive currents provided
by the wind turbines are taken into account
precisely, based on the k factor setting and
the max. current of each turbine/converter.
Ib and Ith are calculated on the basis of
Ik00 and Ik0 . Please note that the option
Current Iteration has been activated on the
Advanced Options page of the short-circuit

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command dialogue!

3.2

Offshore Fault RMS

In the study case 03 Offshore Fault RMS

a simulation of a short-circuit in the offshore
network is presented. The RMS simulation method is used. The fault location is
the node Term b located in the detailed
feeder (first node). The fault is defined via
a short-circuit event. The fault starts at 0.0 s
and is cleared after 150 ms by opening the
breaker which connects the detailed feeder
to the Sub A/A1 terminal. The results are
presented in the two virtual instrument (VI)
panels Windpark res and HVDC res. The
first VI panel contains results of the wind turbines and the fault current. The second VI
panel shows results of the two HVDC terminals.
The results show that the short-circuit can
be handled without tripping the HVDC connection. This is possible because the fault is
in the 33 kV medium voltage network. The
voltage drop at the HVDC AC terminal is
not below 0.8 p.u. due to the impedance of
the three winding transformer. The DFIG
wind turbines in the faulted feeder supply a
controlled fault current even after the feeder
is disconnected (after 150 ms). Finally the
protection scheme disconnects the wind turbines (see Figure 2).

3.3

Onshore Fault RMS

In the study case 04 Onshore Fault RMS

a simulation of a short-circuit in the onshore
network is presented. The RMS simulation
method is used for this example. The fault location is the node Onshore Slack. The fault
is defined via a short-circuit event. The fault
starts at 0.1 s and is cleared after 150 ms
by a second event which removes the fault.
The results are presented on the two virtual
instruments (VI) panels Windpark res and
HVDC res. The first VI panel contains results of the wind turbines and the fault current. The second VI panel shows results of
the two HVDC terminals.
The results show that the offshore wind farm
is not affected by the fault. This is possible

HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

because the wind farm is decoupled from the
onshore AC network via the DC circuit. The
power which cannot be transmitted to the onshore network is consumed by the chopper
resistors (see Figure 3).
The onshore converter switches to a reactive
current priority mode during the fault. This
allows the combined voltage/reactive power
droop control to increase the reactive current
to the maximum value. The active current is
limited during this time via the current limitation (see Section 4 for further controller description).

3.4

Offshore Fault EMT

In the study case 05 Offshore Fault EMT a

simulation of a short-circuit in the offshore
network is presented. The EMT simulation
method is used for this example. The fault
location is the node Term b located in the
detailed feeder (first node). The fault is defined via a short-circuit event. The fault
starts at 0.0 s and is cleared after 150 ms by
opening the circuit breaker which connects
the detailed feeder to the Sub A/A1 terminal. The results are presented on the two
virtual instrument (VI) panels Windpark res
and HVDC res. The first VI panel contains
results of the wind turbines and the fault current. The second VI panel shows results of
the two HVDC terminals.
The results show that the short-circuit can
be handled without tripping the HVDC connection. This is possible because the fault is
in the 33 kV medium voltage network. The
voltage drop at the HVDC AC terminal is
not below 0.8 p.u. due to the impedance of
the three winding transformer. The DFIG
wind turbines in the faulted feeder supply a
controlled fault current even after the feeder
is disconnected (after 150 ms). Finally the
protection scheme disconnects the wind turbines (see Figure 4).
The difference between RMS and EMT simulation is that the EMT simulation takes the
inductive and capacitive behaviour of lines
and transformers into account via differential equations (electro-magnetic transients).
This leads to more precise results. The results include the DC component of the shortcircuit current. This phenomenon cannot be

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simulated with the RMS simulation.

HVDC Control

The HVDC control is based on a generic

structure. It consists of two separate composite models: one controls the onshore
converter with its chopper resistors, the other
one controls the offshore converter.

4.1

Onshore Converter Control

The composite model of the onshore converter control is based on the frame definition
Frame onshore VSC which is displayed in
Figure 6. Each block represents an element
in PowerFactory . The chopper control with
the two DC valves is marked in red. Besides
the chopper control, there are two more controllers in the composite model. These are
the Main Controller and the Current Controller. All controllers will be described in the
following sections.

4.1.1

Main Controller

The onshore converter is a voltage source

converter. It can control the active current
as well as the reactive current. The control objective of the active current is the DC
voltage. The control objective of the reactive
current can be selected via an input parameter. It can be set to control either the voltage
(with a PI controller), the voltage via a droop
or the reactive power (via a PI controller).
This can be changed via the input parameter
MODE. The block definition of the onshore
controller is shown in Figure 7. The active
current control path is marked in red, the reactive current control path is marked in green
and the current magnitude limitation block is
highlighted in blue. During normal operation
the current limiter prioritises the active current (id) and limits the reactive current (iq).
But during and up to 500 ms after faults (i.e.
u < (u0 U t)) the reactive current is prioritised and the active current is limited.
The control uses a first order lag filter (low
pass) on the measured AC voltage and on
the measured reactive power. The filter time

HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

constant is fixed to 10 ms for the voltage and
30 ms for the reactive power. The parameters used in the model are described in Table
1.
On the second page (accessed via the button below Cancel or via the Advanced 1
Tap for PowerFactory version 15.1 and later)
of the common model of the onshore controller there are additional parameters which
represent a characteristic for the current limitation. The values of the characteristic are
presented graphically in Figure 8.

4.1.2

Current Controller

The current controller takes the reference

currents from the main controller and calculates the modulation index which is passed
to the converter. It would also be possible to use the built-in current controller of
the ElmVsc. In this case the option Use
integrated current controller has to be activated on the RMS page of the ElmVsc. The
graphical definition of the current controller
is shown in Figure 9. The control parameters are given in Table 2.

4.1.3

Chopper Control

The Chopper Control has the positive and

negative DC voltage as input signals. It will
ignite the DC valves of the chopper resistors
if the voltage exceeds a certain limit and it
will block these valves if the voltage drops
again below a defined threshold. The chopper resistors are needed in case of a fault in
the onshore network. In this case, the power
which is fed into the DC circuit on the offshore side cannot be transferred to the onshore AC network by the onshore converter.
As a result the DC circuit will be charged.
This can damage the IGBT valves of the converters, therefore the DC chopper has to limit
the voltage to an appropriate value. The
graphical definition of the chopper control is
shown Figure 10. The parameters are given
in Table 3.

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4.2

Offshore Control

The offshore controller has to build the offshore grid voltage. This means the controller
has to keep the frequency and the voltage
magnitude of the AC offshore network at a
constant value. The resulting active and reactive power which flows through the converter cannot be controlled (the converter is
the slack in the offshore system).

4.2.1

Frame of the Offshore Control

Scheme

The definition of the frame used for the composite model of the offshore controller is
shown in Figure 11. There are measurement devices used for detecting the offshore
AC voltage, the AC current of the converter
and for the DC voltage (positive and negative). There is also a PLL (phase locked
loop) measurement device, but this element
should only be in service for EMT simulations (this is managed in the project via a
Variation).

4.2.2

Common Model of the Offshore

Controller

The offshore controller has to keep the AC

voltage magnitude and the frequency to a
constant value. This is done via the input signal Pm (modulation index) and f0
(frequency) of the PWM converter (ElmVsc).
The modulation index is controlled via two
cascaded PI controllers plus a feed forward
path using the measured DC voltage. The
controller structure is shown in Figure 13.
The controller parameters are given in Table
4.
The first PI controller gets the AC voltage deviation as input signal, its output is the reactive current reference. This reference signal
is compared against the measured reactive
current. The output of the second PI controller is then the reference voltage. In the
block Udc Feedforward the reference voltage (AC voltage Uac ) is divided by the measured DC voltage Udc and multiplied with
a constant which depends on the modulation method (see block: Udc Feedforward).
The ratio Uac /Udc cannot be increased in-

HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

definitely as shown in Figure 12.
The
block Udc Feedforward therefore contains
a characteristic which limits the modulation
factor Pm to emulate this effect. For more
information, please read the technical reference paper of the PWM converter element
ElmVsc [2].

templates has to stay open while adding the

template). All type references (line types and
controller definitions) are linked to the library
folder which is located in the template. This
means the template should not be deleted
after the HVDC-System has been added to
the project.

The controller has two additional functions:

1. It has a built-in limitation of the reactive
current. This limitation becomes active
only in case of a fault in the offshore
network. The feedback of the reactive
current (iq) leads to a reduction of the
voltage magnitude at the converter.
2. The control can raise the frequency in
the offshore network in case of high DC
voltage. This can be used as kind of signal to the wind turbines in the network
to reduce the active power output. This
function is disabled by default by using
very high DC voltage threshold values
(the chopper resistor will keep the DC
voltage below these values).

4.3

DFIG Wind Turbine Model

The wind turbine models used in this project

are generic DFIG (doubly-fed induction generator) models which are provided with PowerFactory . These models can be found in
the global templates folder.

References
[1] S. Weigel, B. Weise, M. Poeller:
Control of Offshore Wind Farms with
HVDC Grid Connection, 9th International Workshop on Large-Scale Integration of Wind Power into Power Systems as well as on Transmission Networks for Offshore Wind Power Plants,

18th -19th Oct. 2010, Quebec,

Canada
[2] DIgSILENT Technical Documentation:
PWM Converter, DIgSILENT GmbH,
Gomaringen, Germany, 2008
[3] TransmissionCode
Netzund
Systemregeln
der
deutschen

Ubertragungsnetzbetreiber
(Network and System Rules of the German
Transmission System Operators), VDN,
Berlin, 2007

HVDC Template

The project contains a template of the HVDC

system. This template contains all network
elements, all controllers and all types of the
HVDC system (see Figure 5). To use the
HVDC system in another project the template HVDCSystem which is located in the
folder \Library\Templates has to be copied
into the target project (to the Templates
folder). Then it can be used via the General
Templates button, as shown in Figure 14.
Pressing the General Templates button will
open a new window which shows all available templates. The HVDCSystem has to
be marked. After this it can be added to
the project by clicking in the single line diagram (please note that the window with the

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 1: Activation of the Simulation Toolbox

Figure 2: Results offshore fault, RMS simulation

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 3: Results onshore fault, RMS simulation

Figure 4: Results offshore fault, EMT simulation

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 5: Single line diagram for the HVDC system as modelled in PowerFactory

Figure 6: Frame of the onshore HVDC control system

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 7: Onshore converter control structure

Figure 8: Current limit characteristic of onshore controller

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 9: Onshore converter current control structure

Figure 10: Chopper control structure

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 11: Frame of the offshore HVDC control system

Table 1: Parameters onshore controller
Parameter
umax
x
Trudc
Droop
Ku
Kiu
Kdu
fltMODE
K flt
Kd
Td
iqfmax
Ut
MODE
i max

Value
1.15
0.1487
0.001
0.05
12
100
0
1
2
10
0.1
1
0.1
1
1.1

Unit
p.u.
p.u.
s
p.u.
1/s
1/s
s
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.

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Description
Max. internal voltage allowed
Series reactor impedance
DC Voltage Filter Time Constant
Gain for Droop Control
Gain of PID Droop-Controller (Q and Vac)
Integral Constant of PID Droop Controller (Q and Vac)
Derivative Constant of PID Droop Controller (Q and Vac)
0 = ctrl. acc. MODE, 1 = ctrl. acc. TC 2007 [3]
Reactive current gain in fault mode
Gain of DC PI Controller
Integral Time Constant of DC PI Controller
Max. reactive current in fault case
Voltage Deviation to enable Fault Mode
0 = voltg. ctrl., 1 = droop, 2 = Q ctrl.
Current Limit

11

HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 12: PWM Converter Characteristic [2]

Figure 13: Controller structure of offshore converter

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 14: Button to enter templates

Table 2: Parameters onshore current controller

Parameter
Kpm
Tpm
P min
P max

Value
1.0000
0.0020
-3.0000
3.0000

Unit
p.u.
s
p.u.
p.u.

Description
Proportional Gain for d & q axis
Integral Time for d & q axis
min limit Pm for d & q axis
max limit Pm for d & q axis

Table 3: Parameters chopper controller

Parameter
UdcUpper
UdcLower

Value
1.20
1.10

Unit
p.u.
p.u.

Description
Threshold for Chopper Connection
Threshold for Chopper Disconnection

Table 4: Parameters offshore controller

Parameter
Kuac
Tuac
Kiac
Tiac
F ref
Tfilter U
UdcHigh
UdcLow
plusFrequ
i min
Uac min
i max
Uac max
Frequ Grad

Value
2.00
0.20
2.00
0.02
1.00
0.005
99.00
0.00
0.03
-0.70
-0.10
0.70
1.10
1.00

Unit
p.u.
s
p.u.
s
p.u.
s
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.
p.u.
1/s

Description
Proportional Gain for Voltage Controller
Integrator Time Const. for Volt. Controller
Proportional Gain for Current Controller
Integrator Time Const. for Cur. Controller
Reference Frequency
Time constant for PT1-Filter
Upper Udc Limit for Frequ. Lifting (high value disables function)
Lower Udc Limit for Frequ. Lifting
Value of Frequ. Lifting
Min Limit Value for Current Limitation
Min Limit for Offshore Voltage
Max Limit Value for Current Limitation
Max Limit for Offshore Voltage
Gradient for Frequ.

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