abstract: The growth of energy demands in recent years has been increasing faster than the expansion of transmission facility construction. This tendency cooperating with the continuous investing on the renewable energy resources drives the research, development, and construction of HVDC projects to create a more reliable, affordable, and environmentally friendly power grid. Constructing the hybrid AC-HVDC grid is a significant move in the development of the HVDC techniques; the form of dc system is evolving from the point-to-point stand-alone dc links to the embedded HVDC system and the multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) system. The MTDC is a solution for the renewable energy interconnections, and the MTDC grids can improve the power system reliability, flexibility in economic dispatches, and converter/cable utilizing efficiencies. The dissertation reviews the HVDC technologies, discusses the stability issues regarding the ac and HVDC connections, proposes a novel power oscillation control strategy to improve system stability, and develops a nonlinear voltage droop control strategy for the MTDC grid. To verify the effectiveness the proposed power oscillation control strategy, a long distance paralleled AC-HVDC transmission test system is employed. Based on the PSCAD/EMTDC platform simulation results, the proposed power oscillation control strategy can improve the system dynamic performance and attenuate the power oscillations effectively. To validate the nonlinear voltage droop control strategy, three droop controls schemes are designed according to the proposed nonlinear voltage droop control design procedures. These control schemes are tested in a hybrid AC-MTDC system. The hybrid AC-MTDC system, which is first proposed in this dissertation, consists of two ac grids, two wind farms and a five-terminal HVDC grid connecting them. Simulation studies are performed in the PSCAD/EMTDC platform. According to the simulation results, all the three design schemes have their unique salient features. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2017

Cette thèse porte sur la commande de réseaux multi-terminaux à courant continu (MTDC) basés sur des convertisseurs multiniveaux modulaires (MMCs).Tout d’abord, notre attention se focalise sur l'énergie stockée en interne dans le MMC qui constitue un degré de liberté additionnel apporté par sa topologie complexe. Afin d’en tirer le meilleur parti, les limites de l’énergie interne sont formulées mathématiquement.Afin de maîtriser la dynamique de la tension DC, l’utilisation de ce nouveau degré de liberté s’avère d’une grande importance. Par conséquent, une nouvelle de stratégie de commande, nommée «Virtual Capacitor Control», est proposée. Cette nouvelle méthode de contrôle permet au MMC de se comporter comme s’il possédait un condensateur de taille réglable aux bornes, contribuant ainsi à l’atténuation des fluctuations de la tension DC.Enfin, la portée de l’étude est étendue au réseau MTDC. L'un des défis majeurs pour un tel système est de faire face à une perte soudaine d'une station de convertisseur qui peut entraîner une grande variation de la tension du système. A cet effet, la méthode de statisme de tension est la plus couramment utilisée. Cependant, l'analyse montre que l'action de contrôle souhaitée risque de ne pas être réalisée lorsque la marge disponible de réserve de puissance du convertisseur est insuffisante. Nous proposons donc une nouvelle structure de contrôle de la tension qui permet de fournir différentes actions en fonction du signe de l'écart de la tension suite à une perturbation, associée à un algorithme qui détermine les paramètres de statisme en tenant compte du point de fonctionnement et de la réserve disponible à chaque station. / The scope of this thesis includes control and management of the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)-based Multi-Terminal Direct Current (MTDC).At first, our focus is paid on the internally stored energy, which is the important additional degree of freedom brought by the complex topology of MMC. In order to draw out the utmost of this additional degree of freedom, an in-depth analysis of the limits of this internally stored energy is carried out, and they are mathematically formulated.Then, this degree of freedom of the MMC is used to provide a completely new solution to improve the DC voltage dynamics. A novel control strategy, named Virtual Capacitor Control, is proposed. Under this control, the MMC behaves as if there were a physical capacitor whose size is adjustable. Thus, it is possible to virtually increase the equivalent capacitance of the DC grid to mitigate the DC voltage fluctuations in MTDC systems.Finally, the scope is extended to MMC-based MTDC grid. One of the crucial challenges for such system is to cope with a sudden loss of a converter station which may lead to a great variation of the system voltage. The voltage droop method is commonly used for this purpose. The analysis shows that the desired control action may not be exerted when the available headroom of the converter stations are insufficient. We thus propose a novel voltage droop control structure which permits to provide different actions depending on the sign of DC voltage deviation caused by the disturbance of system voltage as well as an algorithm that determines the droop parameters taking into account the operating point and the available headroom of each station.