By Aleksandra Lekic, Vaibhav Nougain, Goran Dobric, Aditya Shekhar, Pablo Eguia Lopez, Jose Marıa Maza-Ortega, Manuel Barragan-Villarejo, Pedro P. Vergara, and Morgan Kiani

Power systems undergo major changes by including more complex devices, especially those resulting from power electronic equipment. The use of converters contributes to significant changes in the operation and control of the system and in the fault current levels, making AC protection solutions insufficient to detect and eliminate fault currents. Additionally, distributed generation causes effects l ike protection blinding and makes classical protection schemes prone to maloperations or failure to operate.
Furthermore, the transmission systems are heading toward becoming hybrid using high-voltage AC and highvoltage DC connections. Hence, the systems can be affected not only by AC faults but also by DC faults, which make the power system far more vulnerable due to large fault current amplitudes. The control and protection schemes here are much more complicated as the current needs to be eliminated in several milliseconds (compared to several hundred milliseconds needed to eliminate the AC fault currents).

Figure 1: HVDC electrical grid in the North Sea.

 

In collaboration with IEEE IES, and Horizon Europe project SUNRISE, we have developed this course which covers the design aspects of the power electronic converters used for DC applications, control of the power systems with the high penetration of renewable energy sources, and their protection. The main focus of the course is the description of the Transmission System Operator (TSO) maintained electrical grid with high voltage (HV) ratings, and DC connection, or so-called HVDC electrical grid. However, the course concludes with a description of the need for proper transmission-distribution coordination and the need for detailed power system planning.
After attending the course, the attendees will know the design aspects of the power electronic converters used for DC applications, control of the power systems with the high penetration of renewable energy sources, and their protection.

1 Course organization

Dr. Morgan Kiani from the Texas Christian University oversaw the development and organization of this program. The main goal was set such that after finishing the course, the students can claim the “certificate of attendance” provided by IEEE IES with 76 personal development hours (PDH) credits which is equivalent to 3 ECTS. She coordinated with Dr. Alexandra Lekic to ensure a comprehensive coverage of the targeted education goals of the series.
There are 8 hours of theoretical lectures covering the basics of the control and protection of HVDC/AC electrical grids. The rest of the lectures cover such grids’ design and testing aspects in the form of recorded practical lectures (duration 1 hour), available practical libraries, and 3 voluntary assignments. All recordings are available at the IEEE IES Resource Center website: https://resourcecenter.ies.ieee.org/education/control-and-protection-hvdcac-electrical-grids.
The laboratory tutorials are developed using the state-of-the-art real-time simulation platforms RSCAD/RTDS, MATLAB, and OPAL-RT. The corresponding lecture files and the developed libraries are on GitHub (satisfying MIT license) and available for future re-use. The course repositories can be found in GitHub: https://github.com/control-protection-grids-tudelft/Control-and-protection-of-HVDC-AC-electrical-grids-IEEE-IES-MOOC.

1.1 Theoretical lectures:

C1 – Design of HV converters and components, module responsible: Dr. Aditya Shekhar
Module duration: 2 hours
Module description: This module provides detailed explanations of the power electronic devices and power system components used for the application in DC power systems. The first part of the module covers the design of the power electronic converter called MMC (modular multilevel converter), supported by its low-level control considerations.
The module concludes with the cables use for HVDC connections, and the industry-related experience by Siemens Energy in converter design.

C2 – HVDC control and stability, module responsible: Dr. Aleksandra Lekic
Module duration: 2.75 hours
Module description: This module covers the simplified MMC model implementation for designing the high voltage DC (HVDC) control. Furthermore, it follows the operation of HVDC electrical grids and their control using classical (proportional integral – PI control) and advanced control principles. It also includes control strategies for a full converter (Type 4) and doubly-fed induction generator (Type 3) wind turbines (WTs) based on the grid following and grid forming approach. The module concludes with the stability observation of the power-to-gas
(P2G) connections.

C3 – HVDC Protection, module responsible: Dr. Vaibhav Nougain
Module duration: 1.75 hours
Module description: This topic covers the basic protection principles and explores the different methods for fault detection that can be used to ensure grid reliability and resilience putting the focus on safeguarding HVDC grids. Time domain fault identification and time domain fault location algorithms are presented and explained.
Furthermore, the HVDC MMC (full/half bridge) control for monopolar and bipolar connection will be treated concerning the needs of future protection principles.

C4 – Distribution grid connection, module responsible: Dr. Pedro Vergara Barrios
Module duration: 1.5 hours
Module description: This module describes the increased need for coordination between the transmission system operator (TSO) and distribution system operator (DSO) for the procurement of support services via flexibility.
The module introduces the concept of flexibility and how it can be exploited by the TSO via resources connected to the DSO networks. Three TSO-DSO coordination models are introduced, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, while technical and computational implementation challenges of flexibility markets at the DSO level are discussed.

1.2 Practical lectures – tutorials

The course contains 4 recorded tutorials that follow the theoretical lectures. Besides the recorded tutorial, each tutorial has an accompanying library and the reader.
RSCAD/RTDS tutorials use the open-source GitHub library [1, 2] as a base, as depicted in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: Steady-state screenshot of 5-Terminal HVDC network developed using RSCAD/RTDS.

 

Tutorials are:
T1 Time-domain fault identification of HVDC systems, author: Dr. Vaibhav Nougain, and Dr. Aleksandra Leki´c, platform: RSCAD/RTDS, based on the publications [2, 3].
T2 Time-domain fault location of HVDC systems, author: Dr. Vaibhav Nougain, and Dr. Aleksandra Leki´c, platform: RSCAD/RTDS, based on the publications [2, 4].
T3 Classical and advanced control approaches, authors: Dr. Vaibhav Nougain, Ajay Shetgaonkar, and Dr. Aleksandra Leki´c, platform: RSCAD/RTDS, based on the publications [2, 5–7].
T4 DC link control, author: Dr. Manuel Barrag´an-Villarejo, platform: MATLAB/Simulink, based on the publication [8].
The total duration of recorded tutorials is 1 hour.
Besides recorded tutorials, there are also libraries developed for the OPAL-RT, authored by Dr. Vaibhav Nougain and Dr. Aditya Shekhar. The library contains the models for:
• Back-to-back MMC,
• Grid forming and grid following VSCs.
All this material, together with voluntary assignments, can be found in the GitHub repository [9].

Lecturers

The course is given by 16 lecturers from 4 different universities (Delft University of Technology, University of Seville, University of Belgrade, and University of the Basque Country), 3 companies (TenneT, DNV, and Siemens Energy), and from 4 European countries (Netherlands, Spain, Serbia, and Germany). Delft University of Technology is responsible for the creation of the course in collaboration with NewMedia Centre.

Responsible lecturer for the course

Dr. Aleksandra Lekic (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc, M.Sc, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 2012, 2013, and 2017, respectively. Between 2012 and 2018 she has been a Teaching Assistant with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, and an Assistant Professor from 2018 to 2019. In 2019 she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven, and at the Institute EnergyVille, Genk, Belgium. Since January 2020, Aleksandra works as a tenured Assistant Professor at TU Delft, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science in the group Intelligent Electrical Power Grids.
Aleksandra leads a team of researchers specializing in the Control of HVDC/AC power systems. She is an Associate Editor in the International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, by Elsevier, and Electrical Engineering, by Springer.
Aleksandra is responsible for the MOOC itself and for the module C2 of the course. She has given lectures C2.1-C2.4, and tutorial T3. She has (co-)designed the MATLAB models used for assignments A1 and A2.

Other lecturers

The lecturers are mentioned following the lecture order.

Dr. Aditya Shekhar received a bachelor’s degree (Hons.) in electrical from the National Institute of Technology, Surat, India, in 2010, and the M.Sc. (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in June 2015 and January 2020, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the DC Systems, Energy Conversion and Storage Group, Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology.
Aditya is responsible for the module C1 of the course. He has given lectures C1.1-C1.6.

Dr. Mohamad Ghaffarian Niasar was born in Tehran, Iran in 1984. He received an M.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2008 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2015. He is currently an assistant professor at the High Voltage Technologies group at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. His main research interests are the aging of electrical insulation, high-voltage power electronics, high-frequency power transformers, power cables, and FEM modeling. Mohamad has given lecture C1.7.

Prof. Mart A. M. M. van der Meijden (Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree (Hons.) in electrical engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1981. Since 2011 he has been a Part-Time Full Professor with the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computers Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. His chair and research focus is on Large Scale Sustainable Power Systems. He has 40 years of working experience in the field of process automation and the transmission and the distribution of gas, district heating and electricity. He is leading research programs on intelligent electrical power grids, reliable and large scale integration of renewable (wind, solar) energy sources in the European electrical power systems and advanced grid concepts. Between 2003 and 2023 he has been with TenneT TSO, Europe’s first cross-border grid operator for electricity. He was a Manager R&D/Innovation and was responsible for the development of the TenneT long-term vision on the electrical transmission system. Prof. van der Meijden is a Member of ENTSO-E/RDIC, ETIP SNET, and CIGRE, and he has joined and chaired different national and international expert groups.
Mart has given lecture C2.0.

Dr. José Luis Rueda Torres was born in 1980. He is currently an Associate Professor leading the research team on Stability, Control, and Optimization, within the Intelligent Electrical Power Grids Section, Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. He received the Electrical Engineer Diploma from Escuela Politecnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador, with cum laude honours in August 2004. From September 2003 till February 2005, he worked in Ecuador, in the fields of industrial control systems and electrical distribution networks operation and planning. In November 2009, he received a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the National University of San Juan, obtaining the highest mark ”Sobresaliente” (Outstanding). Between August 2010 and February 2014, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at EAN. His research interests include stability and control of power systems and multi-energy systems, power system operational planning & reliability, and probabilistic and artificial intelligence methods.
José has given lecture C2.5.

Dr. Ravi Shankar Singh is an experienced electrical engineer with knowledge in the domain of modelling, measurements and testing of power systems. He received his Bachelors in Technology degree in 2009 at National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. Till 2012 he worked at Alstom T&D India in the field of HV substation engineering, design and commissioning. He received his Master’s in Science degree from Aalto University in Finland in 2016 and his PhD from TU Eindhoven in Netherlands in 2021. Since 2021 he is working with DNV Group R&D for energy systems in the Netherlands. The focus of his work is on assurance of assets in power grids using cyber-physical modeling and simulations. He is particularly involved in using controller hardware-in-loop testbeds to test the performance of controllers of inverter based resources like wind, solar PV, BESS and STATCOM. He is also involved in projects to investigate the impact of large-scale implementation of new optimization and control algorithms for EVs and home batteries on the power grid. He is an active member of Dutch CIGRE national study committee B4 for DC systems and power electronics.
Ravi has given lecture C2.6.

Joris van Doorn is currently working in the Asset Management Department of TenneT as Asset Specialist for HVDC. Here he works on DC grid planning methodologies for Hubs and DC switching stations for TenneT. He focuses on the development of multiterminal multivendor HVDC with special interest in protection and fault separation devices. As adviser for the North Sea Wind Power Hub consortium he works on the multiterminal system design. He is member of various Cigre working groups related to HVDC.
Joris has given lecture C3.1.

Dr. Pablo Eguia Lopez is associate professor in power systems engineering at the University of the Basque Country since 2013. He is principal researcher of GISEL research
group and the University of the Basque Country coordinator of the interuniversity PhD program in “Electrical Energy Systems”. He is Spanish member of the group of EU SET
Plan on HVDC and DC Technologies. He has been principal researcher of several industrial and scientific projects in the area of integration of renewable energy into power systems,
HVDC and FACTS and power system protection. He works as consultant for different manufacturing companies of power converters and protection relays. He has authored
more than 200 journals and conferences papers.
Pablo has given lecture C3.2.

Dr. Vaibhav Nougain received a B.Tech degree in electrical engineering in 2017 from Delhi Technological University (Formerly Delhi College of Engineering), and a Ph.D. degree
in electrical engineering, from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India in 2022. He was a Visiting Student with The Center for Electric Power and Energy (CEE),
Technical University of Denmark in 2019. Since January 2023, Vaibhav has been working as a Postdoc Researcher at TU Delft, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and
Computer Science in the group Intelligent Electrical Power Grids.
Vaibhav is responsible for the module C3 of the course.Vaibhav has given lectures C3.3 and C3.4, and tutorials T1, T2 and T3. He has also designed the
models used for tutorials in RTDS, all libraries for OPAL-RT, and MATLAB models for assignment A3.

Dr.-Ir. Epameinondas Kontos received the Diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 2010.
He obtained the M.Sc. (cum laude) degree in sustainable energy technology and the PhD in control and protection of multi-terminal HVDC networks from the Delft University of
Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2013 and 2018 respectively. During his PhD he worked as guest researcher in the Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University,
Aalborg, Denmark. In 2017 he joined Siemens AG in Erlangen, Germany as Studies Expert for HVDC systems. He has worked in several commercial projects as Control
and Protection Studies Lead and since 2023 he works as Innovation Manager for Power Electronics at the Innovation Center Berlin of Siemens Energy. His interests include control
and protection of HVDC based on multilevel modular converters, MVDC systems, artificial intelligence based energy management systems and design of power electronics.
Epameinondas has given lecture C3.5.

Prof. Peter Palensky received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. and Habilitation degrees from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, in 1997, 2001,
and 2015, respectively. He co-founded Envidatec, a German startup on energy management and analytics, and joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA,
USA, as a Researcher and the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2008. In 2009 he became an Appointed Head of Business Unit on Sustainable Building Technologies with the
Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and later the First Principle Scientist for Complex Energy Systems with AIT. In 2014, he was appointed as a Full Professor of Intelligent
Electric Power Grids, TU Delft. His main research fields are energy automation networks, smart grids, and modeling intelligent energy systems. He is active in international committees
like ISO or CEN and serves as IEEE IES AdCom member-at-large in various functions for the IEEE. He is the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine and
an Associate Editor for several other IEEE publications, and regularly organizes IEEE conferences.
Peter has given lecture C4.1.

Dr. Pedro P. Vergara was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1990. He received a B.Sc. degree (with honors) in electronic engineering from the Universidad Industrial de
Santander, Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2012 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Campinas, UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil, in 2015. In 2019, he
received his Ph.D. degree from both institutions, the University of Campinas, UNICAMP, Brazil, and the University of Southern Denmark, SDU, Denmark. In 2019, he joined Eindhoven
University of Technology, TU/e, in The Netherlands as a Postdoctoral Researcher. In 2020, he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the Intelligent Electrical Power Grids
(IEPG) group at Delft University of Technology, also in The Netherlands. He also served as a Guest Editor in special issues related to active distribution networks in the IEEE
MPCE Journal and IEEE Transactions on JPV Journal. Pedro is responsible for module C4 and has given lecture C4.2.

Dr. Goran Dobric, born in 1986 in Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia, is an accomplished professor and researcher in electrical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Power Networks and Systems from the University of Belgrade in 2016, with a focus on the monitoring and diagnostics of metal-oxide surge arresters. Goran holds the position of Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering University of Belgrade and previously served as a faculty member at the American University of the Middle East, Kuwait. His research contributions include 12 SCI-listed international journal papers, 4 papers in nationally recognized journals, and active participation in numerous international and national conferences. Goran has also played a key role in 12 studies and projects conducted by the School of Electrical Engineering University of Belgrade.
Goran has given lecture C4.3.

Prof. José Maria Maza-Ortega (Senior Member, IEEE) holds a PhD on Electrical Engineering (2001). He is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Seville. He is currently the coordinator of the Joint PhD Program on Electric Power Systems offered by the University of Sevilla, University of Malaga, Polytechnic University of Catalonia and University of the Basque Country. He has participated in more than 60 R&D and technology transfer projects with public and private funding, being principal investigator in 20 of them. He is the author of more than 80 publications in journals indexed in the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR) and international conferences. He has co-authored also 2 patents. Finally, he is co-founder of Ingelectus – Innovative Electrical Solutions, a start-up of the University of Seville, which commercializes smart grid technologies for modern power systems.
José Maria has given lecture C4.4.

Ajay Shetgaonkar (Graduate Student Member, IEEE) received a B.E. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Goa College of Engineering, Goa, India, in 2016. In 2020, he received an M.Sc. degree in electrical power engineering from the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands (graduated with “cum laude”). He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. His research interests include future power system dynamics and stability, integration of renewable energy resources, modeling of HVdc breaker, and design of advanced protection and control systems for modular multilevel converter-based HVdc systems in the HVdc grid. He is also a student member of CIGRE.
Ajay has contributed to the tutorial T3 and the RTDS library that served as the basis for the RTDS models [1].

Dr. Manuel Barragan-Villarejo is an Industrial Engineer (2008) and Ph.D. in Electrical Power Systems (2014) from the Universidad de Sevilla, where he currently works as an Associate Professor attached to the Department of Electrical Engineering. His research career has been focused since its beginnings within the TEP-196 “Electrical Energy Systems” group in the field of power electronics application to distribution networks to favor the integration of distributed energy resources, with a notable emphasis on the experimental validation and use of real-time simulators such as OPAL-RT, SpeedGoat and Typhoon HIL. He has participated in more than 20 R&D projects with public funding and several private R&D contracts with companies in the electrical and industrial sectors, including several projects funded by the European Union. As an indicator of the quality of his research activity, he has published more than 20 papers in international journals indexed in JCR and 20 papers in international conferences. He has participated in training and summer school activities within the EASY-RES and SUNRISE projects funded by the European Union, explaining the benefits of using C-HIL to accelerate the prototyping of VSCs.
Manuel has given tutorial T4 and designed the MATLAB models used for the tutorial.

Dr. Morgan Kiani (S’05–M’05–SM’17) has been a faculty member in the Engineering Department at Texas Christian University since 2011 and is a full professor at TCU. Her research, scholarly activities, teaching, and service in the engineering department at TCU, across IEEE OUs and IES have allowed her to empower individuals to engage in activities that promote access to education, clean green energy and healthy living locally and globally. She has been an influential member of the WiE and she introduces resources that can help women set higher education and career goals in STEM fields. She loves the power that education can put in people’s hands and wants to help create more resources through local community, research and advocacy. Her belief in open source’s potential and online education to drive innovation encourages her to dedicate time and effort to promoting collaboration, sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusivity within opensource and online education. Kiani represents IES in IEEE Smart Village and she has been an active member of IEEE Smart Village Governing Leadership Board. She is a member of the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Board Partnership Committee, IEEE Education Activities Faculty Resources Committee, and the IEEE Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion too.

The course was supported by two teaching assistants:
• Divye Nikhil Kanawala,
• Zeba Habeeb Rahaman,
and the team of audio/video experts from NewMedia Centre located at TU Delft. The course has also received the significant support by the IEEE IES Resource Centre.