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A novel approach for optimal cabling and determination of suitable topology of MTDC connected offshore wind farm cluster
Journal
Electric Power Systems Research
ISSN
03787796
Date Issued
2022-07-01
Author(s)
Paul, Santanu
Rather, Zakir Hussain
Abstract
The advancement of technologies has shifted focus from onshore to offshore wind farms (OWFs) to extract the maximum benefit out of wind resources. Capital investment for OWFs is high; hence, proper planning is inevitable to utilize resources efficiently. This paper proposes a novel two-level planning approach, where in the first level, optimal cable connection of OWFs has been determined. In the second level, reliability and economic evaluation of different configurations of high voltage DC (HVDC) connected OWFs have been studied. Three OWFs of different shapes and ratings, however, with the same wind profile and connected to onshore voltage source converter- HVDC (VSC- HVDC) platform through HVDC link, have been considered in this study. In the first level, the placement of wind turbines (WTs) in the individual OWF is optimized using particle swarm optimization. Following that, an optimal combination of WT clusters of OWFs is obtained using the agglomerative hierarchical clustering technique. In this context, two objectives, such as economy and reliability have been considered. The traveling salesman problem is formulated to obtain minimized cable lengths inside each WT cluster of the OWF. The cost of submarine cable is used to evaluate the economic aspect, whereas expected energy not supplied (EENS) is taken as the reliability index. A sequential Monte Carlo method has been developed to calculate EENS considering random outage of WTs and cables. In the next level, an economic and reliability assessment of the entire multi-terminal DC (MTDC) OWF cluster is performed. Economic assessment is performed considering the total cost of different MTDC components, whereas, forced outage of the components is considered to assess the reliability index. A comparative study of different connection topologies of MTDC OWF configurations shows that mesh connection has the highest reliability and availability (94.97%). On the other hand, multi-terminal topology has the least investment cost which is 12.40% and 7.51% more economical compared to mesh and radial topology respectively.
Subjects