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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION
Contribution of VSC-HVDC to Frequency Regulation
of Power Systems With Offshore Wind Generation
Hongzhi Liu and Zhe Chen, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Modern large wind farms are required to provide
frequency regulation service like conventional synchronous gen-
eration units. The frequency support capability of modern wind
farms has been widely investigated and implemented. Remotely
located large offshore wind farms are probably connected to the
onshore system grid through voltage-source converter-based–high
voltage direct current (VSC-HVdc) transmission systems. Due to
the decoupling of VSC-HVdc and signal transmission delay, off-
shore wind farms may not be able to respond to the onshore grid
frequency excursion in time and, consequently, the stability and
security of the power system will be put at risk, especially for those
with high wind penetration. This paper proposes a coordinated
control scheme to allow VSC-HVdc link to contribute to the sys-
tem frequency regulation by adjusting its dc-link voltage. By means
of this approach, the dc capacitors of VSC-HVdc are controlled to
absorb or release energy so as to provide frequency support. To fur-
ther enhance the system frequency response, the frequency support
from VSC-HVdc is also finely coordinated with that from offshore
wind farm according to the latency of offshore wind farm respond-
ing to onshore grid frequency excursion. The control scheme is
evaluated for both underfrequency and overfrequency events, and
results are presented to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Index Terms—Frequency support, inertial response, offshore
wind generation, voltage-source converter-based–high voltage di-
rect current (VSC-HVdc).
I. INTRODUCTION
INCE the beginning of this century, the installation of large
S offshore wind farms (OWFs) is speeding up, especially in
Europe. The generation of a large offshore wind farm could
be dozens of megawatt or even hundreds of megawatt, which
well matches the generation of conventional power plants. With
the increasing integration of large OWFs into power grids, it
inevitably leads to the retirement of conventional power plants.
Therefore, to maintain the stability of power systems with high
wind penetration, modern large OWFs are required to be op-
erated like conventional power plants. They need not only to
supply energy, but also to provide ancillary services, such as
voltage control and frequency regulation [1], [2].
However, the electromechanical behavior of variable-speed
wind turbines (VSWTs), which comprise modern OWFs, differs
fundamentally from that of conventional synchronous genera-
Manuscript received June 5, 2014; revised January 18, 2015; accepted March
20, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Norwegian Centre for Offshore
Wind Energy (NORCOWE) under Grant 193821/S60 from the Research Council
of Norway. NORCOWE is a consortium with partners from industry and science,
hosted by the Christian Michelsen Research. Paper no. TEC-00409-2014.
The authors are with the Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg Univer-
sity, 9100 Aalborg, Denmark (e-mail: liuhzer@hotmail.com; zch@et.aau.dk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TEC.2015.2417130
0885-8969 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
tors (SGs). In the event of a sudden loss of a large power supply
or a sudden increase in power demand, SGs are able to extract
kinetic energy from their rotating masses (inertial response) to
slow down the rate of change of frequency (ROCOF) at the very
instant of the event. Soon after the disturbance, SGs will pro-
vide an additional power (primary control reserve) to stabilize
the deviated frequency at a new steady-state level due to the
droop setting of governors. In contrast, VSWTs that are inter-
faced with ac power grid via voltage source converters (VSCs)
are naturally considered inertia-less to ac power systems [3],
[4], and may have no primary control reserve as the wind is not
controllable [5]. Thus, the integration of large OWFs along with
the decommissioning of conventional power plants is bound to
reduce the system inertia and primary control reserve. Without
countermeasures, this would put power system security at high
risk. To solve this problem, ancillary frequency support schemes
have been equipped to VSWTs for active power control. In [6]–
[8], control methods for converters were proposed to provide
short-term frequency support by utilizing the rotational kinetic
energy of VSWT’s generator. The implementation of energy
reserve was also reported in [9] and [10] by forcing VSWT to
operate in a deloading mode by means of converter control and
pitch angle control.
Large OWFs are probably far away from onshore connection
point. To integrate a long-distance large-scale OWF into the on-
shore power grid, voltage-source converter-based–high voltage
direct current (VSC-HVdc) transmission is more attractive and
applicable compared to HVAC transmission system [11]–[15].
For transferring the same amount of power, dc cables are smaller
with lower losses and have no limitations in length owing to the
immunity from charging current. VSC-HVdc transmission also
has other advantages, such as fully controlled power flow, inde-
pendent reactive power control at each ac end, and independently
controlled active and reactive power [13]–[16]. However, on one
hand, OWFs would not be directly affected by onshore system
disturbances due to the decoupling of VSC-HVdc. On the other
hand, this decoupling would prevent OWFs from immediate re-
sponding to system disturbances of the onshore ac network. For
a system frequency deviation, it is apparent that OWFs cannot
provide immediate frequency support following the frequency
transient due to communication delay. VSC-HVdc, which per-
forms well on voltage support [17], [18], does not generally re-
spond to the frequency deviation. In [19]–[21], the participation
of VSC-HVdc-connected OWFs in the system frequency regula-
tion was investigated. However, all these studies focused only on
developing artificial coupling methods between offshore and on-
shore networks using the VSC-HVdc link, but did not probe into
the potential frequency support capability of VSC-HVdc itself.
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION
Fig. 1. Structure and control of FCWT.
An inertia emulation control (INEC) strategy for VSC-HVdc
transmission systems is proposed in [22] and [23]. It used stored
energy in the HVdc dc capacitors to provide an inertial response
and contribute to primary frequency control of the studied ac
network. However, the performance of the INEC was evaluated
only in a relatively weak ac network with only one conventional
SG. Besides, the DFIG-based wind farm connected via the VSC-
HVdc did not participate in system frequency regulation, and
the dc capacitors employed in this study was relatively larger
than common configuration.
This paper explores the frequency regulation capability of
VSC-HVdc that is used to integrate a large OWF into the on-
shore power grid. A coordinated control strategy is proposed
to simplify the transmission of onshore frequency signal to off-
shore wind turbines, and to enable VSC-HVdc to provide inertial
response by means of partially charging/discharging of its dc ca-
pacitors. To further improve the system frequency response, the
cooperation with the frequency support from OWF is also con-
sidered with respect to the latency of OWF responding to the
onshore grid frequency disturbances.
The organization of this paper is as follows. Section II
introduces the frequency support strategies for VSWTs and
VSC-HVdc. Section III presents the test power system and
methodology adopted in this study. Section IV reports a se-
ries of case studies and simulation results. Section V presents
the conclusions of this study.
II. FREQUENCY SUPPORT STRATEGIES
A. Frequency Support Strategy for Wind Turbine
In this study, full-converter wind turbine (FCWT) is used
and its detailed modeling can be found in [24]–[26]. Fig. 1 il-
lustrates the structure and control diagram of the FCWT that
is modeled in DIgSILENT/PowerFactory. The generator-side
converter regulates the generator active power through the d-
axis current controller and the generator voltage through q-axis
current controller. The controller of the grid-side converter sta-
bilizes the dc capacitor voltage, and maintains a unity power
factor operation through d- and q-axis currents, respectively,
as well. In Fig. 1, Pm d and Pm q are the d-axis and q-axis
pulse width indices, respectively, and the asterisked variables are
references.
To fulfill the frequency support capability, an ancillary fre-
quency controller is designed and shown in Fig. 2. It can be
divided into two parts: underfrequency controller, that is, ac-
tivated if the measured frequency is under 49.8 Hz, and over-
frequency controller that is activated if the measured frequency
is over 50.2 Hz. In Fig. 2, the active power reference Pω ref is
determined by the wind turbine generator speed via a maximum
power tracking. The active power reference Punder (p.u.) and
Pover (%) are generated by the under- and over-frequency con-
trollers, respectively. The total active power reference value Pg∗
to the wind turbine generator is then given as
Pg∗ = Pω ref × Pover + Punder . (1)
1) Underfrequency Controller: The underfrequency con-
troller is used to enable the FCWT to provide inertial response
and release active power reserve if applicable, when the system
frequency drops lower than 49.8 Hz (nominal 50 Hz) that is
determined by the author in the simulation experiments. From
Fig. 2, it can be seen that the underfrequency controller is also
composed of two components: inertia controller and droop con-
troller. A demonstrative diagram of the underfrequency con-
troller is shown in Fig. 3.
The inertia controller is applied to emulate the inertial re-
sponse of SGs and its output active power reference Pinertia
is proportional to the derivative of the system frequency. The
droop controller is applied to emulate the response of the speed
governor of a SG, and its output active power reference Pdro op
is proportional to the absolute deviation of the system nomi-
nal frequency. Hence, the output Punder of the underfrequency
controller can be given as
dfm eas fnom − fm eas
Punder = −Kinertia · + (2)
dt R
where Kinertia is the gain of the inertia controller, R is the
adjusting coefficient of the droop controller, fm eas is the mea-
sured system frequency, and fnom is the nominal frequency of
the power system.
2) Overfrequency Controller: Fundamentally, the overfre-
quency controller reduces the current active power generation
with a 40% gradient of the presently available power per hertz if
the measured frequency exceeds 50.2 Hz in terms of E.ON Grid
Code [27]. While coordinated with the ancillary frequency con-
trol of VSC-HVdc, a participation coefficient Kover has been
employed to offset the influence of regulation of VSC-HVdc
on the peak frequency during overfrequency disturbances. The
control is described as
yo = 1 − Kgrad · (f − fup ) · Kover (3)
where yo is the output control signal, f is the system frequency,
and fup is equal to 50.2 Hz, which is the activating threshold
value. The value of Kover is determined according to the wind
capacity penetration level (WCPL), which is defined as
total installed wind capacity (MW)
WCPL = × 100%.
total load capacity (MW)
(4)
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LIU AND CHEN: CONTRIBUTION OF VSC-HVDC TO FREQUENCY REGULATION OF POWER SYSTEMS WITH OFFSHORE WIND GENERATION
Fig. 2. Ancillary frequency control for FCWT.
Fig. 3. Demonstrative diagram of the underfrequency controller.
Since the VSC-HVdc capacity as well as its dc capacitance
is directly related to the connected wind farm rating, the WCPL
can then be thought as an index to reflect the frequency support
level of the VSC-HVdc using the proposed control. In this study,
the WCPL is around 40% and, thus, Kover is assigned to “1.4.”
The reduction of generation of FCWT is achieved by increasing
the pitch angle.
3) Primary Frequency Reserve Implementation: Conven-
tional synchronous generating units are able to provide primary
frequency reserve within 30 s. As mentioned above, when a
frequency disruption occurs, the governor of a convention SG
detects the frequency decline, and then increases its mechani-
cal power output to drive the SG to generate additional active
power. As a result, the imbalance between the power demand
and supply is reduced or eliminated, and the system frequency
is stabilized at an off-nominal point.
Dissimilarly, VSWTs are inherently noncapable of providing
primary frequency reserve due to the uncontrollability of the
wind speed. However, with customized control strategies, the
FCWT can generate less active power than its available capa-
bility. The margin between the actual generation and available
generation can be considered as a primary frequency reserve.
To obtain the active power reserve margin, the FCWT must op-
erate in a deloading mode instead of in the maximum power
extraction mode. The deloading operation can be achieved by a
3
Fig. 4. Modified pitch angle controller.
wind turbine generator speed control and/or a pitch angle control
[9], [10].
In this study, rated wind speed is applied, and only pitch angle
control is implemented to realize primary frequency reserve of
FCWT. To enable FCWT to provide an active power reserve
margin for frequency support, an angle increment Δβ is added
to force the FCWT to operate in the deloading mode. The value
of Δβ determines the deloading level, namely the capacity of
an active power reserve. A 10% deloading level (Δβ ≈ 1.7◦ ) is
set for frequency regulation study, and the modified pitch angle
controller is shown in Fig. 4.
B. Frequency Support Strategy for VSC-HVdc
VSC-HVdc transmission system is attractive for connecting
remotely located OWFs to the onshore main grid. From the point
of view of a power system, it acts as a zero-inertia generator
that can control active and reactive power instantaneously. The
scheme of the VSC-HVdc used in this study is shown in Fig. 5.
The offshore VSC is responsible for collecting power gen-
erated by the OWF. Due to the decoupling of VSC-HVdc, it
operates as a reference machine to set reference frequency, volt-
age amplitude, and phase angle for the offshore network. The
onshore VSC controls the power flow to the onshore grid by
controlling the dc-link voltage and voltage amplitude at the
connection point. A constant dc-link voltage indicates an ac-
tive power balance between onshore and offshore VSCs, which
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION

Fig. 7. Equivalent circuit of a VSC. (a) AC side. (b) DC side.

Fig. 5. Generic scheme of the VSC-HVdc. [28]. The two sides are coupled each other with a controlled
voltage source and a controlled current source
    
d isd −R/L ω isd
=
dt isq −ω −R/L isq
 
1 −vsd + vcd
+ (5)
L −vsq + vcq
3
Pac = (vcd · isd + vcq · isq ). (6)
2

and the dc-side can be given as

Fig. 6. Modified offshore VSC control with an ancillary frequency control. Pdc = Idc · Vdc . (7)
According to the law of energy conservation and from
means that the active power entering VSC-HVdc is equal to the Fig. 7(b), we can get
active power leaving it.
dVdc
Basically, in the mentioned scheme, the VSC-HVdc system Pdc = Pac + C · · Vdc . (8)
itself cannot provide addition active power to support an onshore dt
grid frequency excursion. It even blocks the OWF from directly Then, by substituting (6) and (7) into (8), we can have
responding to the state changes of the onshore grid. In other 3 dVdc
words, the existence of the VSC-HVdc actually deteriorates the Idc · Vdc = (vcd · isd + vcq · isq ) + C · · Vdc . (9)
2 dt
participation of FCWT-based OWFs in a system frequency reg-
From (9), it can be seen that to ensure the power balance
ulation. Hence, to cope with this impairment, a new frequency
between the offshore and onshore VSCs, the dc voltage must be
support strategy for VSC-HVdc is developed.
controlled constant. However, since the capacitor is an energy
1) Frequency Signaling: Generally, the control and measure-
storage element, it is obvious that it can be used to release or
ment data are transmitted to individual FCWTs via standard
absorb power by leveling down or up its voltage. The energy
SCADA link. However, this direct communication method has
change Wc and power change pc of a capacitor from t1 to t2 can
a relatively longer latency that is not suitable for events that
be expressed as
FCWTs are required to respond instantly.
 V d c (t 2 )
Therefore, instead of setting the reference frequency at a con-
stant value for the offshore grid, the offshore VSC is controlled Wc = C Vdc · dVdc (10)
V d c (t1)
to vary the reference frequency fwf along with the onshore grid
frequency fgrid by adding an ancillary control loop as shown in dWc (t1 , t2 )
Pc = . (11)
Fig. 6, in which Pm is the magnitude of the pulse width modula- dt
tion index, and F0 is the input frequency to VSC, which allows Therefore, it is realistic to exploit this characteristic of dc
varying the frequency of the output voltage. In the ancillary fre- capacitor of VSC-HVdc for grid frequency regulation. By means
quency signaling loop, the grid frequency fgrid is transmitted of adjusting the dc-link voltage, VSC-HVdc is able to inject
via the communication interface of the VSC-HVdc. In this way, more or less active power into the onshore grid than that it
the onshore grid frequency signal is contained in the offshore collects from the offshore wind farm.
electrical waveforms. Thus, individual offshore FCWTs can de- For this specific purpose, an ancillary dc voltage controller
tect the onshore grid frequency disturbance by monitoring the is proposed, and the modified onshore VSC control is shown in
∗
offshore grid frequency and react swiftly. Fig. 8. The additional dc voltage reference Vdcf is determined
2) Ancillary DC Voltage Control: Fig. 7 shows the equivalent by the frequency deviation, which is passed to a first-order lag
ac-side and dc-side circuits of a VSC, in which R represents the with gain Kf . To control the energy-releasing speed of the dc
loss of the VSC and the VSC reactor, L is the reactor inductance, capacitors, the time constant Tf of the first-order lag is also
Vs is the grid bus voltage, and Vc is the VSC output voltage [13], tuned in terms of the latency of the communication interface of
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LIU AND CHEN: CONTRIBUTION OF VSC-HVDC TO FREQUENCY REGULATION OF POWER SYSTEMS WITH OFFSHORE WIND GENERATION
Fig. 8. Modified onshore VSC control with ancillary frequency control.
∗
the VSC-HVdc system. This value of Vdcf is limited to ±0.1 p.u.
of the nominal dc voltage, but in realistic applications, it should
be determined with respect to insulation requirements, PWM
functionality etc. In such a way, when the frequency deviation is
recognized, the change rate of dc voltage is controlled according
to the communication latency between the stations of VSC-
HVdc. The voltage changes faster when the latency is shorter
and slower when the latency is longer. That also represents that
the dc capacitors are able to release its energy continuously until
wind turbines start to react to the grid frequency deviation.
The ancillary dc voltage controller is activated when the grid
frequency is out of the range 49.8–50.2 Hz. Once the grid fre-
quency is lower than 49.8 Hz, the dc voltage is controlled down
to 0.9 p.u. to release a part of the stored energy in the dc ca-
pacitance. When the grid frequency is higher than 50.2 Hz, the
dc voltage is controlled up to 1.1 p.u. to absorb the energy
transmitted from the offshore VSC. Since the dc capacitance
and voltage variation for a certain VSC-HVdc are limited, the
power released/absorbed by the dc capacitance is also limited.
Therefore, in this study, the VSC-HVdc is controlled to provide
efficient frequency support until the offshore FCWTs sense the
onshore grid frequency disturbance and start to respond to it.
III. STUDIED SYSTEM
The power system presented in Fig. 9 has been used for this
study. It is derived from [29]. It consists of three conventional
power plants: one medium fast hydropower plant, one fast gas
turbine, and one coal-fired power plant. The three plants are
connected on the 230-kV level via a closed ring with overhead
lines. Load A, B, and C are aggregated static loads and Load D
is composed of induction motors.
A large FCWT-based OWF rated at 135 MW is integrated
into the grid via VSC-HVdc on Bus 5 (PCC). That means that
wind power supplies about 40% of the grid’s load consumption.
The OWF in this study operates at rated wind speed for the
duration of the simulating time, and the power system operates
at 50 Hz. The parameters of the simulated VSC-HVdc are listed
in Table I.
5
In this study, the system frequency excursion is carried out by
step increase/decrease of Load C. A step increase of 46% active
power and 10% reactive power of Load C is simulated at 1.0 s
to cause an underfrequency event. This results in the system
frequency to drop to nearly 49.0 Hz without frequency supports
from OWF and VSC-HVdc. Similarly, the overfrequency event
is resulted from a step decrease of 20% active power and 5%
reactive power of Load C at 1.0 s. During the event, the maxi-
mum frequency is around 50.4 Hz if the OWF and VSC-HVdc
do not participate in the frequency regulation.
To evaluate the proposed control strategies, a 10% reserve
margin setting of FCWTs is implemented by pitch angle adjust-
ment. For different frequency events, cases listed in Table II are
studied in the simulations.
IV SIMULATIONS
The modeling and simulations in this study are conducted in
DIgSILENT/PowerFactory 14.1.
A. Underfrequency Event
Fig. 10 presents the simulation results for the sudden load in-
crease with 300 ms latency of VSC-HVdc communication inter-
face. The frequency response of the ac power system is shown in
Fig. 10(a). It is observed that the frequency support from the off-
shore wind farm makes up active power for the load increase and
reduces the frequency drop significantly. The frequency is also
stabilized much faster at a higher steady-state value compared to
the case without offshore wind farm frequency support. More-
over, the participation of frequency support from VSC-HVdc
improves the nadir frequency further. However, due to the la-
tency of measurement and the VSC-HVdc communication, the
initial ROCOF of the frequency decline is not ameliorated evi-
dently though both offshore wind farm and VSC-HVdc provide
frequency support.
The offshore wind farm generation is shown in Fig. 10(b).
It can be seen that if the ancillary frequency controller is not
activated, the operation of FCWTs is not affected due to the de-
coupling of converters. In the cases that the frequency controller
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION

Fig. 9. Studied system.

TABLE II
TABLE I STUDY CASES
PARAMETERS OF THE SIMULATED VSC-HVdc

Case Description
VSC rated power 150 MVA
1 Without any frequency support
VSC-rated ac rms voltage 150 kV 2 Frequency support from offshore wind farm only
VSC-rated dc voltage ±150 kV 3 Frequency support from both offshore wind farm and VSC-HVdc
Copper loss 0 kW
No-load loss 0kW
DC capacitor 450 μF × 4

maintains at the rated level again. When the ancillary frequency

of FCWTs is activated, it can be observed that at the instant that
the frequency drop is detected by the FCWTs, there is a sudden
increase of the active power generation of the offshore wind farm
as a result of the decrease of both turbine generator speed and
pitch angle. The participation of VSC-HVdc in the frequency
regulation does not exert evident influence on the generation of
the OWF.
Fig. 10(c) and (d) presents the response of VSC-HVdc for
the load increase. It can be seen from curves of Case 2 that the
onshore VSC increases its active power output [see Fig. 10(d)]
as offshore wind farm starts to generate more power to sup-
port the frequency [see Fig 10(b)], while only offshore wind
farm responds to the frequency decline. Accordingly, the dc
voltage in Fig. 10(c) fluctuates a bit at the time that the active
power output of the onshore VSC increases sharply and then
controller of VSC-HVdc is activated, the dc voltage is con-
trolled to drop down to 0.9 p.u. quickly as shown in Fig. 10(c)
to release part of the power stored in dc capacitance. In conse-
quence, the onshore VSC is able to infeed more active power
into the onshore grid to support the frequency as illustrated in
Fig. 10(d). This coordinated frequency regulation of offshore
wind farm and VSC-HVdc obtains better frequency response as
mentioned above.
The influence of frequency support from the offshore wind
farm and VSC-HVdc on main grid spinning reserve is illustrated
in Fig. 10(e). The grid spinning reserve is the summation of the
spinning reserve of all conventional SGs. It is obvious that en-
abling frequency support from offshore wind farm has positive
effect on the grid spinning reserve, whereas the frequency sup-
port from VSC-HVdc barely affects the system spinning reserve
due to its short activation time.
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LIU AND CHEN: CONTRIBUTION OF VSC-HVDC TO FREQUENCY REGULATION OF POWER SYSTEMS WITH OFFSHORE WIND GENERATION
Fig. 10. System response for sudden load increase. (a) System frequency.
(b) OWT active power. (c) HVdc dc-link voltage. (d) Onshore VSC active
power. (e) Total spinning reserve of the grid.
B. Overfrequency Event
A sudden decrease of Load C results in the frequency to be
over the upper acceptable limit (50.2 Hz). The simulation results
for the sudden load decrease scenario are shown in Fig. 11, while
the communication delay of VSC-HVdc is also 300 ms.
The system frequency response is shown in Fig. 11(a). It
can be seen that the frequency support provided only by the
offshore wind farm does not improve the initial frequency dy-
namics but reduces the peak frequency and achieves signifi-
cant enhancement on the frequency restoration. Comparably,
the joint frequency support provided by both offshore wind farm
and VSC-HVdc further lowers down the peak frequency more
7
Fig. 11. System response for sudden load decrease. (a) System frequency.
(b) OWT active power. (c) HVdc dc-link voltage. (d) Onshore VSC active
power. (e) Total spinning reserve of the grid.
obviously. However, without special coordination, the participa-
tion of VSC-HVdc in overfrequency regulation aggravates the
restoration of the frequency as observed by comparing “Case2”
with “Case3 without Kover .” By introducing the participation
coefficient Kover to the overfrequency controller of FCWTs
in the case “Case3 with Kover = 1.4,” it can be seen that the
negative impact of the support from VSC-HVdc on frequency
restoration is alleviated.
Fig. 11(b) presents the offshore wind farm generation re-
garding the given overfrequency event. According to (3), the
reduction in the offshore wind farm generation is proportional
to the overfrequency deviation. As above mentioned, the VSC-
HVdc support reduces the peak frequency. However, it, in turn,
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION
covers the actual severity of the frequency variation to FCWTs
and, thus, weakens the FCWTs’ frequency support as the red
curves illustrate in Fig. 11(a) and (b). The correction is done by
the employment of participation coefficient Kover . By compari-
son between “Case2” and “Case3 with Kover = 1.4,” it is clear
that the wind farm active power in “Case 3 with Kover = 1.4”
is very close to that in “Case 2.”
Fig. 11(c) and (d) presents the response of VSC-HVdc for
the sudden load reduction. It can be observed from Fig. 11 that
in the frequency-rising period, the dc voltage is controlled to
increase to let the dc capacitors charge and absorb energy that
slows down the ROCOF and reduces the absolute frequency
deviation. After the offshore wind farm reduces its generation
as a response to the overfrequency as shown in Fig. 11(b), the dc
voltage begins to drop [see Fig. 11(c)], and the dc capacitors then
begin to discharge and release energy that impairs the frequency
restoring. The charging and discharging of dc capacitance are
reflected in the active power output of onshore VSC as shown
in Fig. 11(d). The influence of the introduction of Kover on dc
voltage and onshore VSC active power output are also clearly
presented in Fig. 11(c) and (d), respectively.
Fig. 11(e) shows the changes for the sudden load reduc-
tion with respect to main grid spinning reserve. By com-
parison, it is apparent from Fig. 11(e) that the frequency
support from VSC-HVdc smoothes the fluctuations in spinning
reserve.
V. CONCLUSION
A new control strategy is developed in this paper to al-
low the VSC-HVdc transmission to contribute to the system
frequency regulation without additional investment. The ancil-
lary frequency controller added to the offshore VSC simplifies
frequency signal communicating and reduces the latency of off-
shore wind farm responding to the onshore grid frequency de-
viation. The ancillary frequency controller added to the onshore
VSC utilizes the dc capacitor banks to release/absorb energy by
adjusting its voltage to fluctuate in a certain range. As a conse-
quence, the VSC-HVdc is able to respond to system frequency
excursion almost immediately and vary its active power output
to support the system frequency.
The implementation of the proposed control strategy is de-
liberately coupled with the frequency control of the FCWTs of
the offshore wind farm, which is integrated into the onshore
power grid by the VSC-HVdc. Through simulations and anal-
ysis, it is shown that the proposed control strategy allows the
VSC-HVdc to provide effective inertial response without any
extra investment. The coordination of the frequency control of
the VSC-HVdc and wind turbines obtains a significantly en-
hanced frequency response for the studied power system. The
collective frequency support capability is comparable to that of
conventional power plants.
However, subject to the VSC-HVdc dc-link voltage and dc
capacitor capacity constraints, the amount of the energy re-
leased/absorbed by the dc capacitors is limited and, therefore,
the frequency support from VSC-HVdc is only temporary. In
view of this, the frequency-responding latency of the offshore
wind farm directly affects the strength of the inertial response
from the VSC-HVdc.
This proposed control strategy could probably be adapted to
the VSC multiterminal HVdc system, which is of great interest
to many authorities these days. If this is the case, a dedicated
communication system as well as a coordinated control strategy
seems to be indispensable. The proposed scheme is to coordi-
nately control a wind farm and a VSC-HVdc system that is used
to connect the wind farm to an onshore power grid. It may also
apply to other wind farm technologies, including DFIG systems.
In principle, the wind farm needs to have a relevant power con-
trol method adapted, if a VSC-HVdc is used for connecting it
to the main power grid.
It is foreseeable that with the large-scale development and
utilization of offshore wind power and VSC-HVdc interconnec-
tions, the participation of OWFs and VSC-HVdc transmissions
in the system voltage and frequency regulation will play a sub-
stantial role. Hence, the significance of the method provided
herein becomes more notable.
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Hongzhi Liu received the B.Eng. degree in electrical
engineering from the Taiyuan University of Tech-
nology, Shanxi, China, in 2000; the M.Sc. degree in
electrical engineering from Northwestern Polytech-
nical University, Shanxi, in 2004; the M.Phil. de-
gree in information technology from the University
of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, in 2009;
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
the Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg Uni-
versity, Aalborg, Denmark, in 2014.
Zhe Chen (M’95–SM’98) received the B.Eng. and
M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the
Northeast China Institute of Electric Power Engineer-
ing, Jilin City, China, in 1982 and 1986, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Durham, Durham, U.K, in 1997.
He is currently a Full Professor with the De-
partment of Energy Technology, Aalborg University,
Aalborg, Denmark, where he is also the Leader of
the Wind Power System Research Program in the
Department of Energy Technology, and the Danish
Principle Investigator for the Wind Energy of Sino-Danish Centre for Education
and Research, Beijing, China. He has more than 300 publications in his techni-
cal field. His research interests include power systems, power electronics, and
electric machines, and his main current research interests include wind energy
and modern power systems.
Dr. Chen is an Associate Editor of Renewable Energy of the IEEE TRANS-
ACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS; a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering
and Technology, London, U.K.; and a Chartered Engineer in the U.K.