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Low frequency AC (LFAC) has been proposed as a means to avoid some of the large converter station costs of high voltage DC (HVDC) while delivering some of the benefits in terms of better line or cable utilization and its technical feasibility has been established. It is said to offer a lower costs than HVDC or conventional high voltage AC (HVAC) for a range of intermediate distances, with HVDC becoming cheaper over long distances. However, the basis for identifying the distance range and extent of cost saving has not been established. Here, cost estimate methodologies are extended for LFAC. A difficulty is the absence of commercial schemes that can provide practical examples of costs. In this paper, costs are broken down into constituent terms and estimates are made from the most similar equipment from other schemes. The capacity limits and power losses associated with subsea cables are analyzed for low frequency cases. For a given power transfer and for each distance, a choice of operating voltage, cable size and number of parallel circuits is made in order to find the lowest route cost. This yields cost as a function of distance that is a non-linear and discontinuous function. The cost curves for LFAC are compared with HVDC and HVAC options. The results for current cost estimates show that LFAC has a range of route length over which it is the lowest cost option and but this range narrows and eventually ceases to exist for higher power transfer ratings.

This paper presents a method to calculate the minimal size of cell capacitors in multilevel VSCs which meets a maximum voltage deviation criterion under ideal conditions. This method is applied to the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC), the Alternate Arm Converter (AAC) and the hybrid multilevel converter with ac-side cascaded H-bridge cells (AC-CHB). The results show that the newer VSC topologies exhibits smaller energy deviation in their stacks, leading to an overall smaller volume of cell capacitors for the converter station but often accompanied by some compromises such as higher power losses or degraded DC current waveform quality.

A new operating mode of the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) using modified arm current waveforms inspired from the working principle of the Alternate Arm Converter (AAC) is presented in this paper. A reduction in the cell voltage deviation is observed at power factors close to unity at the cost of an increase in power losses, especially when reactive power is required. This gain in voltage margin is then used in further optimizations of the MMC performance, mainly focusing on either increasing the number of redundant cells or improving the overall power efficiency of the converter.

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