HVDC Overlay for US Grid |
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Many European countries have taken steps towards a Supergrid to enable the transmission of large amounts of intermittent and remote renewable energy over long distances to load centers. In the US, a similar problem arises as renewable generation and electricity demand increases. A potential solution is to upgrade the transmission system at a higher voltage by constructing a new overlay grid. American Electric Power (AEP) has developed a conceptual 765 kV interstate transmission system of approximately 19 k miles that has the ability to interconnect up to 400 GW of generation as shown in Fig.1. A similar topology of DC transmission grid would be built adopting multi-terminal VSC HVDC technology. A first step would be implementing a five terminal VSC HVDC system over a 140 bus NPCC system model, thus transmitting cheap renewables like wind and hydro to load centers on the east coast.
 Fig 1. AEP conceptual 765kV backbone system |
 Fig 2. Five-terminal HVDC overlay of NPCC system |