Design and Valuation of High-Capacity HVDC Macrogrid Transmission for the Continental US

Dynamic stochastic joint expansion planning of power systems, natural gas networks, and electrical and natural gas storage

“…The NPV of operational cost is modeled in (2). The maintenance and operational costs of natural gas and thermal power plants are addressed in (2a).…”

“…In the past decades, the share of natural gas in electricity generation has increased from 24% to 39% [1]. As more coal generation is retired, and increasing investment in intermittent renewable resources demands more flexibility for secure operation of power systems, the investment in natural gas-fired generation units will increase [2]. Thereafter, the power systems and natural gas networks have become more interdependent.…”

Control of multi-terminal VSC-HVDC systems for combined AC/DC systems to improve power system dynamic performance

“…Recent studies have shown that significant economic benefits can be achieved by developing additional cross-seam HVDC transmission between these asynchronous interconnections [36,37,8]. Some examples of the economic benefits include access of load centers to richer renewable resources, interregional sharing of most economic energy resources on a diurnal basis, and interregional sharing of capacity to satisfy each regions annual peak and consequential decrease in capacity investments.…”

“…Several topologies have been proposed for the design of a North-American HVDC macrogrid overlay [39,37,40]. Finally, in Design 3, a continental HVDC overlay, the so called Macrogrid is built, co-optimized with other investments in AC transmission and generation.…”

“…Similar to Section 4.4.2, the outage of Gen102 (450MW) in A1 of the AC-MTDC test system is used as the contingency to compare different frequency control performances with the proposed As briefly introduced in Section 1.1.3.3, in order to reduce the cost of developing and utilizing the renewable energy resources in the US, such as wind in the Midwest and solar in the southwest, the "Interconnection Seam Study" [36,37,102] proposes to interconnect the asynchronous AC systems via a continental HVDC overlay. Figure 6.1 shows the seams between the three asynchronous AC interconnections in the US, namely the Westerin Interconnection (WI), the Eastern Interconnection (EI) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT); it also shows and the geographic distribution of different types of renewable resources [12] and the major load centers, which can be seen are typically far away from each other.…”