North Sea Wind Power Hub Feasibility Study: Methodology For System Adequacy Design (Part I)

An innovative concept of hub-and-spoke has been proposed by North Sea Wind Power Hub (NSWPH) consortium to combine electricity transmission from wind farms to shore with interconnectors. The hub-and-spoke are based on elementary block types in bipolar configuration at rated voltage of 525 kV with dedicated metallic return and are used in association to build the distributed hub scenarios. In this paper, a heuristic design-based approach is presented. A given study case is designed following four main steps. The proposed methodology allows to design AC or DC Internal Interconnections (II) depending on the power capacities and distances in “Step 1”. It also proposed an optimized II redundancies (from economical point of view) in “Step 3” and “Step 4” for the studied study case. Finally, an optimized design of the study case is derived, and its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are computed. These KPIs show that the final design exhibits a non-negligible gain in term of TOTal EXpenditures (TOTEX), comparing the initial study case.