Distributed Voltage Regulation and Automatic Power Sharing in Multi-Terminal HVDC Grids

Conventional droop control methods for power-sharing in a multi-terminal high voltage DC (MTDC) grid lead to voltage deviation from the nominal value. Moreover, the power-sharing is inaccurate in the droop-controlled MTDC system. This paper proposes a secondary controller with a distributed architecture to compensate the voltage deviation and to achieve equal power sharing automatically among the converter stations. A distributed observer is used to estimate the average voltage of the converter stations. The proposed distributed controller and observer use local measurements of output powers and voltages, and only communicate with neighboring stations. Therefore, the requirement of the global information in the centralized secondary control schemes is eliminated, which reduces the communication requirement and improves the reliability of the MTDC grid. The case studies illustrate that the proposed distributed controller regulates the stations' average voltage and shares the power mismatch accurately. Impact of the communication time-delays and the control gain on stability of the MTDC grid are also investigated using the Lyapunov-KrasovskiiLMI condition. It is shown that reducing the control gain can stabilize the MTDC grid in the case of large communication time-delays.