The main development trend of wind power generation systems is large offshore wind farms (OWFs) with grid connection. However offshore wind farms have grown rapidly due to much better wind conditions. Hence, several large scale offshore wind farms are planned to be built and installed at distances greater than 100 km from the coast. Traditionally, an AC collector scheme collects energy from the wind farm and step up the voltages by power transformers and transmit power via AC submarine cables to the onshore substation. However, this is suitable for shorter distances about 50 km. When the distances are greater the AC transmission of bulk power from the wind farm to the onshore grid via undersea cables is not viable due the reactive power issues. Therefore HVDC transmission is now being considered for the grid connection of wind farms. However as wind farms constitute weak systems Line commutated converter (LCC) based HVDC is not viable and newer Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) based Voltage Source Converters(VSC) are needed for AC-DC conversion. Opting for dc systems for both power collection and transmission pose a number of technical challenges in terms of developing HVDC breakers and DC -DC converters.

Comparison of Single-stage and Multi-stage Marx DC-DC converters for HVDC application.

A DC-DC converter suitable for the grid integration of windfarms through a DC grid is presented. The operation is based on the Marx principle where charged capacitors are connected in series and parallel in turn to achieve the voltage transformation. The two inductors at the two ends of the converter are designed to resonate with the capacitors to create resonance forcing current zeros to enable zero current switching thereby reducing switching losses. The design of a 50 MW, 6kV/30kV DC-DC converter was carried out by analysis and simulation.

This paper presents an improved cascaded DC-DC resonant converter for offshore windfarms. The improvements are reduced losses and the number of components. The topology is based on the Marx principle where charged capacitors are charged in parallel and discharged in series to achieve the voltage transformation. The four inductors of the converter are designed to resonate with the capacitors to create resonance forcing current zeros to enable zero current switching thereby reducing switching losses. The operating principles and design considerations of the proposed converter are discussed and the design equations are presented. In order to evaluate the operation of 50 MW converter aimed at connecting a 30 kV DC Busbar in a wind power collection system to a 360 kV high voltage DC bus for transmission to the onshore grid was simulated and the results are presented.

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