Novel DC ring topology and protection system - a comprehensive solution for mega city power grids

The development of mega cities leads to increased load concentration and brings additional challenges to managing the electrical grid while keeping power available for critical loads. Techniques using FACTS devices are being applied to alleviate power management difficulties and to confine faults in their originating areas in order to limit the risk of cascading failures in the grid. The addition of many FACTS devices often results in control and protection coordination difficulties, power oscillations between connected networks, subsynchronous resonance problems, and torsional interactions with nearby generator units. The most effective solution is obtained when the individual AC subsystems representing sources and loads are decoupled so a fault in a given subsystem is not propagated to another subsystem. This solution can be achieved by the deployment of a DC system where power sources and loads are connected to the DC bus through voltage source converters. For a mega city, this would be conceived as a DC ring feeding multiple loads and connected to remote and local power sources.;Unfortunately, the lack of fast DC circuit breakers has been one of the key issues affecting extensive applications of DC systems with common DC buses; a DC fault would discharge all the capacitors of the DC bus and cause delays in system recovery and possibly a wide system collapse.;In this research, I provide a comprehensive solution to mega city power grid problems by proposing a DC system topology that enables grid expansions without affecting existing protection settings or changing existing AC breaker ratings. I also propose the means for protecting the DC system by designing a fast DC breaker and developing a control algorithm capable of isolating DC faults without blocking converter stations or depleting DC bus capacitors. My contribution is three folds: (1) I modeled and simulated Shanghai power grid and performed a study to identify short circuit and voltage stability problems using data provided by ABB corporate research located in China. I built on the work that had been performed in ABB China by considering different contingencies and I applied solutions using individual FACTS devices such as FCL, SVC-LightRTM, and HVDC-LightRTM. I analyzed the results from each solution in order to assess its merits and limitations in dealing with fault current and voltage stability problems. Then I presented a novel DC ring topology that provides redundancy, better protection against cascading faults, and does not increase short circuit levels. With this topology, adding loads or power sources does not impact system protection or performance. (2) I proposed two novel designs for a DC circuit breaker that is of critical importance to DC applications using multiple converter stations. The proposed designs solve the problem of DC fault clearing without causing significant voltage drops, current oscillations, or shutting down of any converter station connected to the DC bus. The DC breaker rated at a voltage of 320 kV and a current of 3000 A can interrupt DC currents as high as 70 kA within 800 mus. (3) I proposed a novel placement of the DC circuit breakers within the DC ring topology combined with an intelligent protection algorithm that optimizes fault detection and isolation without affecting the rest of the DC system. The protection scheme uses local measurements and special coordination techniques for clearing solid faults and uses differential measurements to identify and isolate high impedance faults.