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).
1 Content
This document presents a model of a high
voltage direct current (HVDC) system. Simu-
lations are performed and the results are dis-
cussed. The simulations show the behaviour
of the HVDC system in the case of onshore
and offshore faults.
2 Base Model
In the Base Case of the HVDC Offshore
Wind Farm example, a model of an off-
shore 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 net-
work. Each wind turbine has a nominal
active power of 5 MW. The machines are
equipped with doubly-fed induction genera-
tors (DFIG, wind turbine type 3). Only 10
of the 80 wind turbines are modelled as in-
dividual machines (these are represented in
∗ DIgSILENT GmbH, Heinrich-Hertz-Str. 9, 72810
Gomaringen, Germany, www.digsilent.de
DIgSILENT PowerFactory, r1337
the “Detailed Feeder” single line diagram).
The remaining 70 turbines are aggregated
into four DFIG models: three models repre-
senting 20 parallel machines and one rep-
resenting 10 parallel machines. This ap-
proach 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 PowerFactory’s global li-
brary. The template includes models of the
main elements of the wind turbine (Gener-
ator and Transformer), as well as the addi-
tional 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 gener-
ator to the network (the frequency converter
is connected internally). The HVDC link was
modelled using the VSC element in Power-
Factory . The control structure is of a generic
type. A description of the control structure
used is given in chapter 4. A short descrip-
tion 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 calcu-
lation or simulation, please refer to the other
Study Cases (see section 3).
3 Calculations and Simula-
tions
The following sections will describe the re-
sults which can be obtained using the dif-
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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm
ferent study cases of the project “HVDC Off-
shore 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 ini-
tialised first. The required dialogue is acces-
sible via the button Calculate Initial Condi-
tions ( ). 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 press-
ing the Start Simulation button ( ) and exe-
cuting the command. The results are visible
after the simulation has finished.
3.1 Short-Circuit Calculation
In the study case “02 Short Circuit Calcu-
lation” of the HVDC Offshore Wind Farm
example the short-circuit calculation is pre-
sented. Please press the Calculate Short-
Circuit button ( ) to execute the short-
circuit calculation.
Since the IEC 60909 standard does not re-
flect the fault behaviour of modern wind tur-
bines, the DIgSILENT Complete Method is
used to calculate their short-circuit contribu-
tions. 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. short-
circuit currents; loads, capacitances of lines,
magnetizing currents of transformers, shunt
elements and filters are ignored in the pos-
itive 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 itera-
tion 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 simula-
tion 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 tur-
bines and the fault current. The second VI
panel shows results of the two HVDC termi-
nals.
The results show that the short-circuit can
be handled without tripping the HVDC con-
nection. 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 tur-
bines (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 lo-
cation 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 re-
sults of the wind turbines and the fault cur-
rent. 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
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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 on-
shore 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 limita-
tion (see Section 4 for further controller de-
scription).
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 de-
fined 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 termi-
nal. 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 cur-
rent. 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 con-
nection. 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 tur-
bines (see Figure 4).
The difference between RMS and EMT sim-
ulation is that the EMT simulation takes the
inductive and capacitive behaviour of lines
and transformers into account via differen-
tial equations (electro-magnetic transients).
This leads to more precise results. The re-
sults include the DC component of the short-
circuit current. This phenomenon cannot be
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simulated with the RMS simulation.
4 HVDC Control
The HVDC control is based on a generic
structure. It consists of two separate com-
posite 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 con-
verter 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 con-
trollers in the composite model. These are
the “Main Controller” and the “Current Con-
troller”. 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 con-
trol objective of the active current is the DC
voltage. The control objective of the reactive
current can be selected via an input parame-
ter. 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 re-
active 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 cur-
rent (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 priori-
tised 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
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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm
constant is fixed to 10 ms for the voltage and
30 ms for the reactive power. The parame-
ters used in the model are described in Table
1.
On the second page (accessed via the but-
ton below Cancel or via the ’Advanced 1’
Tap for PowerFactory version 15.1 and later)
of the common model of the onshore con-
troller there are additional parameters which
represent a characteristic for the current lim-
itation. 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 calcu-
lates the modulation index which is passed
to the converter. It would also be possi-
ble to use the built-in current controller of
the ElmVsc. In this case the option ’Use
integrated current controller’ has to be acti-
vated on the RMS page of the ElmVsc. The
graphical definition of the current controller
is shown in Figure 9. The control parame-
ters 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 chop-
per 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 off-
shore side cannot be transferred to the on-
shore AC network by the onshore converter.
As a result the DC circuit will be charged.
This can damage the IGBT valves of the con-
verters, 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 off-
shore 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 re-
active power which flows through the con-
verter 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 com-
posite model of the offshore controller is
shown in Figure 11. There are measure-
ment devices used for detecting the offshore
AC voltage, the AC current of the converter
and for the DC voltage (positive and neg-
ative). There is also a PLL (phase locked
loop) measurement device, but this element
should only be in service for EMT simula-
tions (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 in-
put 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 de-
viation as input signal, its output is the reac-
tive current reference. This reference signal
is compared against the measured reactive
current. The output of the second PI con-
troller is then the reference voltage. In the
block “Udc Feedforward” the reference volt-
age (AC voltage Uac ) is divided by the mea-
sured DC voltage Udc and multiplied with
a constant which depends on the modula-
tion method (see block: Udc Feedforward).
The ratio Uac /Udc cannot be increased in-
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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 refer-
ence 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

References
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 sig-
nal 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 gen-
erator) models which are provided with Pow-
erFactory . These models can be found in
the global templates folder.
[1] S. Weigel, B. Weise, M. Poeller:
“Control of Offshore Wind Farms with
HVDC Grid Connection”, 9th Interna-
tional Workshop on Large-Scale Inte-
gration of Wind Power into Power Sys-
tems as well as on Transmission Net-
works for Offshore Wind Power Plants,
18th -19th Oct. 2010, Québec, Canada
[2] DIgSILENT Technical Documentation:
PWM Converter, DIgSILENT GmbH,
Gomaringen, Germany, 2008
[3] TransmissionCode - Netz- und
Systemregeln der deutschen
Übertragungsnetzbetreiber (Net-
work and System Rules of the German
Transmission System Operators), VDN,
Berlin, 2007

5 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 tem-
plate “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 avail-
able templates. The “HVDCSystem” has to
be marked. After this it can be added to
the project by clicking in the single line di-
agram (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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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 Value Unit Description

umax 1.15 p.u. Max. internal voltage allowed
x 0.1487 p.u. Series reactor impedance
Trudc 0.001 s DC Voltage Filter Time Constant
Droop 0.05 p.u. Gain for Droop Control
Ku 12 - Gain of PID Droop-Controller (Q and Vac)
Kiu 100 1/s Integral Constant of PID Droop Controller (Q and Vac)
Kdu 0 1/s Derivative Constant of PID Droop Controller (Q and Vac)
fltMODE 1 - 0 = ctrl. acc. MODE, 1 = ctrl. acc. TC 2007 [3]
K flt 2 - Reactive current gain in fault mode
Kd 10 - Gain of DC PI Controller
Td 0.1 s Integral Time Constant of DC PI Controller
iqfmax 1 p.u. Max. reactive current in fault case
Ut 0.1 p.u. Voltage Deviation to enable Fault Mode
MODE 1 - 0 = voltg. ctrl., 1 = droop, 2 = Q ctrl.
i max 1.1 p.u. Current Limit

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HVDC Connected Offshore Wind Farm

Figure 12: PWM Converter Characteristic [2]

Figure 13: Controller structure of offshore converter

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Figure 14: Button to enter templates

Table 2: Parameters onshore current controller

Parameter Value Unit Description

Kpm 1.0000 p.u. Proportional Gain for d & q axis
Tpm 0.0020 s Integral Time for d & q axis
P min -3.0000 p.u. min limit Pm for d & q axis
P max 3.0000 p.u. max limit Pm for d & q axis

Table 3: Parameters chopper controller

Parameter Value Unit Description

UdcUpper 1.20 p.u. Threshold for Chopper Connection
UdcLower 1.10 p.u. Threshold for Chopper Disconnection

Table 4: Parameters offshore controller

Parameter Value Unit Description

Kuac 2.00 p.u. Proportional Gain for Voltage Controller
Tuac 0.20 s Integrator Time Const. for Volt. Controller
Kiac 2.00 p.u. Proportional Gain for Current Controller
Tiac 0.02 s Integrator Time Const. for Cur. Controller
F ref 1.00 p.u. Reference Frequency
Tfilter U 0.005 s Time constant for PT1-Filter
UdcHigh 99.00 p.u. Upper Udc Limit for Frequ. Lifting (high value disables function)
UdcLow 0.00 p.u. Lower Udc Limit for Frequ. Lifting
plusFrequ 0.03 p.u. Value of Frequ. Lifting
i min -0.70 p.u. Min Limit Value for Current Limitation
Uac min -0.10 p.u. Min Limit for Offshore Voltage
i max 0.70 p.u. Max Limit Value for Current Limitation
Uac max 1.10 p.u. Max Limit for Offshore Voltage
Frequ Grad 1.00 1/s Gradient for Frequ.

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