2376

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 3, AUGUST 2013

A Multi-Option Unied Power Flow Approach for Hybrid AC/DC Grids Incorporating Multi-Terminal VSC-HVDC
Mohamadreza Baradar, Student Member, IEEE, and Mehrdad Ghandhari, Member, IEEE
AbstractThis paper proposes a multi-option power ow approach for hybrid AC/DC grids. A unied AC-DC unit is introduced which can be used in two different cases: case a) AC grids with embedded VSC-based MTDC grids, and case b) asynchronous AC grids connected via a common VSC-based MTDC grid. In the proposed method for each MTDC grid (regardless of the number of converters), a new state variable is introduced to handle any kind of converter loss models. For the case (b), the AC-DC unit can be used in two different analyses, namely, a1) the separated analysis and a2) the integrated analysis. Both a1) and a2) can be used in the practical analysis of the real-size power systems. However, it is shown that the separated analysis not only offers a shorter computational time but it is also very suitable for the future connection between large existing AC systems and other AC systems or remote renewable energy sources through the DC grids. The proposed methodology is implemented in MATLAB software and veried using commercial software SIMPOW. Index TermsDC grid, multi-terminal HVDC, power ow calculation, unied AC-DC unit, voltage source converter.

I. INTRODUCTION NTRODUCTION of high voltage direct current (HVDC) technology as a way of transferring the electric power especially between two distant terminals has resulted in many modications in the existing AC power systems. Recently, HVDC systems with more than two terminals have become an attractive option for interconnection of several generating and load sites. Such multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) systems are also well suited for connection of offshore wind farms to onshore AC grids. This is the reason that in [1] MTDC systems have been introduced as a cost-effective solution to connect offshore wind farms to the onshore AC systems. There are many practical reasons proving that the voltage source converters (VSCs) are more suitable for building such MTDC systems. In contrast to the current source converters (CSCs), VSCs not only have no reactive power demand but can also regulate the reactive power to maintain AC side voltage as a generator [2]. VSC technology can rapidly control active power and at the same time reactive power
Manuscript received March 14, 2012; revised July 01, 2012, August 20, 2012, and October 12, 2012; accepted December 17, 2012. Date of publication January 18, 2013; date of current version July 18, 2013. This work was supported by Elektra. Paper no. TPWRS-00208-2012. The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden (e-mail: (mohamadreza.baradar@ee.kth.se; mehrdad.ghandhari@ee.kth.se). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRS.2012.2236366

at each terminal independent of the DC power transmission [3]. Most importantly, in the VSC-based HVDC, power ow is reversed by reversal of the current direction instead of voltage polarity. This ability allows the power to be reversed independently of the power ow direction without switching to reverse voltage polarity. The aforementioned capabilities are perfectly suited to an MTDC system. VSC-MTDC systems with parallel connected converters have a great potential to be used in the future bulk power systems [4]. Possibility of such connections has led to the proposition of a DC SuperGrid that could connect several renewable energy sources to a common MTDC network [5]. However, in order to take advantages of such systems in the real-size power systems, extensive research has to be done to reveal their steady state and dynamic behavior. References [6] and [7] are two recent literatures in which reliability analysis and dynamic behavior of such MTDC systems have been studied, respectively. However, this paper addresses the steady state analysis focusing on the power ow calculation (PFC) of the AC systems incorporating VSC-based MTDC systems. Traditionally, in the previous literature, two major methodologies for PFC of the hybrid AC/DC systems have been used: sequential and unied methodologies. In the sequential methodology, AC and DC power ow are solved sequentially [8]. The routine is to estimate the DC parameters, solve the AC system equations, and then employ the AC solution to modify the DC parameters. These steps continues until convergence is reached. Each time the DC parameters are readjusted, an entire AC solution must be done. Whilst in the unied methodology, the whole AC and DC equations are solved simultaneously [9]. As presented in [8], [10] and [11], the sequential approach may lead to the convergence problems in certain situations. The problems arise from the fact that the discontinuity appears in the rectier interface quantities between successive AC/DC iterations. Results obtained in [12] also show the superiority in the convergence characteristic of the unied method over the sequential one. Above all, these methods have been mostly proposed for the PFC of those hybrid AC/DC girds which incorporate CSCs [8], [9], [13], [14]. Therefore, since there are several major differences between VSCs and CSCs in both operation principle and structure, they cannot be applied to the AC/DC system incorporating VSCs. There are only a few papers addressing PFC of AC/DC systems with VSCs, but they employ the sequential methods, and most of them do not have generality. For instance in [15] and [16], the converter stations, the AC lters and the transformer losses were not considered. In [16], the prespecied values of the converters have been specied at the converter bus rather than the AC grid connected bus. It should be noted that

0885-8950/$31.00 2013 IEEE

BARADAR AND GHANDHARI: MULTI-OPTION UNIFIED POWER FLOW APPROACH

2377

Fig. 1. AC/DC grid with embedded MTDC system.

Fig. 2. Asynchronous AC systems interconnected through a common MTDC network.

although such simplications may lead to an easier computational ways, but they may not be applied to the real-world power systems. Reference [17] has also used the sequential method in which the ltering equipments were neglected as well. In the mentioned paper totally one external, four iterative, and three internal loops, must be separately solved to reach a nal convergence which requires rather a huge number of operations. Such a high number of iterative loops makes the algorithm not only complicated and time consuming, but also unreliable. In [18] a simple unied PFC method was presented which was only applied to an AC/DC grid with embedded MTDC grid, and with lossless converters. The converter losses are one of the main issues why the sequential method has been normally applied. In this paper, it is shown that to any converter loss representations, and to any AC/DC grid congurations the proposed method can be applied to robustly reach a feasible power ow solution. This paper proposes a general unied AC/DC power ow calculation approach in which a unied AC-DC Unit (ADU) is introduced, and it can be used in the following cases: case a) A large AC grid with an embedded MTDC grid where the entire hybrid system is considered as a unied ADU (Fig. 1). case b) Several asynchronous AC systems interconnected via a common MTDC grid (Fig. 2) where two different analysis are employed namely: a1) The separated analysis where the entire hybrid AC/DC system is divided into two groups. The rst group (named external AC system) comprises all asynchronous AC systems which are not directly connected to the slack convertor of the MTDC network (AC systems 2 to ), and the second group which is the unied ADU comprises the AC system 1 directly connected to the slack converter and the whole MTDC system. In this method, PFC is rstly performed for the the rst group, and its relevant results so obtained will be used for PFC of the second group. a2) The integrated analysis where similar to case a) the entire AC/DC system is considered as a unied ADU. Both a1) and a2) can be used in the practical analysis of the real-size power systems. However, it is shown that due to practical issues and computational costs the separated analysis may be a more acceptable method. Also the practical application of separated analysis is when there is a plan to connect a large existing AC system to several smaller AC systems such as wind

Fig. 3. Steady state VSC station model.

farms or other remote renewable energy sources. Through this method there is no need to modify the existing PFC program for the large existing AC system. The proposed method is implemented using the solver fsolve in MATLAB, and the numerical results of the proposed method are compared to those of the commercial software SIMPOW [19]. II. VSC STATION MODEL AND OPERATION MODES In this paper, the detailed steady state model of VSC used in HVDC light [20] is considered for the study. As shown in Fig. 3, the model consists of an AC bus, a coupling transformer, a phase reactor, an AC lter, converter block on the AC and DC sides, a DC bus, DC capacitors and DC lines. Fig. 1 shows an embedded MTDC grid which is connected to AC grid via N VSCs. As seen from a point of common connection (PCC) bus the converter may be either in a PQ or a PV control mode. In the PQ control mode, the active and reactive powers injected from the PCC bus into the converter are specied, and they are dened in this paper by and ; see Fig. 1. In the PV control mode the active power and the voltage magnitude at the PCC bus are specied, and the voltage is dened by . However, in a VSC-MTDC system with N converters, a converter should be considered as a DC slack converter to regulate its DC voltage around a specied value. This is to ensure the power balance in the MTDC network, i.e., (1) is the injected DC power at each DC terminal and is the total loss in the MTDC network. This implies that the active power at the PCC bus connected to a slack converter is not specied, and this unspecied power is dened by . However, the converter may control either the reactive power or the voltage at the PCC bus . where

2378

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 3, AUGUST 2013

III. MOTIVATION OF UNIFIED AC-DC UNIT As discussed before, the prespecied powers can be given only for the PCCs connected to the non-slack converters. Therefore, if an AC bus is connected to a non-slack converter, the converter can be seen by the AC system as a dummy generator or motor at the corresponding PCC bus. However, the PCC which is directly connected to the slack converter poses a problem since active power at this point is not specied. This is determined based problem arises from the fact that on the converter losses and the losses in the MTDC network converters which are unknown before PFC. Thus (2) where is the total loss of the converter station , and is dened by (11). To solve this problem the entire AC system together with the MTDC system are considered as a unit and all AC and DC equations in this unit are simultaneously solved. Furthermore, since the total loss of the slack converter station is also unknown (because it is a function of the passing current through the converter), we may solve this problem with implicit equations. However, in this paper we propose an additional state variable to represent this loss. Therefore, the mismatch equations for this unit consist of three groups: AC mismatch equations, DC mismatch equations and slack loss mismatch equation. One of the advantages of this method is that there is no need to rely on results obtained from other external iterative loops like sequential methods. This method is much faster and the convergence can be reached in a fewer number of iterations than other methods. IV. UNIFIED AC-DC UNIT FOR PFC OF AC/DC GRID WITH EMBEDDED DC GRID In this section, the mathematical models for the unied ADU depicted in Fig. 1 are presented. In the proposed model, the AC system (which is directly connected to the slack converter) together with the MTDC system are considered as a unied AC/DC grid for PFC. For this unied system, a set of mismatch equations consisting of three groups is dened as follows: (3) is a vector containing AC mismatch equations, where is a vector containing DC mismatch equations and is an additional mismatch equation. Moreover, and are dened as follows:

initial values and the given constants (such as the specied powers, voltages, and lines data), the power ow calculation at each iteration is performed as follows: 1) In order to solve all equation together in the system of equations given in (3), all converter and DC variables and constants should be expressed in a per unit system compatible with the AC per unit system. For the AC system, dene of non-slack buses and of PQ-buses as the net generations at the corresponding buses. For an AC system with buses (including the PCC buses) with the admittance matrix , the injected active and into the and reactive AC powers th bus (see Fig. 4) are obtained by

(5) . where 2) Calculate the DC power for . For calculating the injected current has to be dened. Having calculated (5), the injected current can be obtained by (6) where and are the injected powers into the converter from the corresponding PCC bus. is the voltage at the PCC bus. If the PCC bus is connected to a converter with PQ control mode and are known. If the PCC bus is connected to a converter with PV control mode, then is obtained by (7) It should be noted that once the converter hits its reactive power limit, the type of PCC is changed from a PV bus to a PQ bus. Next the DC power shown in Fig. 4 is obtained by

(8) where is the total loss of the converter station which is divided into two parts. The rst part is the losses related to the transformer and the phase reactor which is expressed by (9) where and . The second part of the station losses is the converter block loss which is only a function of dened by (8). Therefore, any converter loss model which is a function of the passing current (i.e., ) can be adopted in the algorithm. One of those models is the generalized converter station

(4) is a vector containing the voltage magnitudes of PQ where buses, and is a vector containing the phase angles of the nonslack AC buses in the AC system. is a vector containing the voltages of the non-slack DC buses in the MTDC system. Finally, is introduced as an additional state variable to represent the total loss of the slack converter station. Given the

BARADAR AND GHANDHARI: MULTI-OPTION UNIFIED POWER FLOW APPROACH

2379

loss model [21] which is a function of the magnitude of , and it is given by (10) where , indicates no-load converter losses. and are the factors representative for linear and quadratic dependency of converter losses on the converter current, respectively. Thus, the total losses in each station are (11) In this paper in order to have almost the same model as in SIMPOW for case a), is dened by (12) (i.e., where is a constant, and it is set to 1.65%) of the power ratings of the converters. For case b), given in (11) is used. which is the admittance matrix of the 3) With MTDC system, and as the specied voltage at the DC slack bus, calculate the injected DC power of the non-slack DC buses into the MTDC network (see Fig. 4) as follows: (13) 4) Calculate the DC injected current bus by into the DC slack

Fig. 4. Structure of the system for mismatch equations at PCC buses and DC buses.

(14) 5) Calculate the slack converter by at the PCC bus connected to the (15) where is the additional state variable. 6) Now, solve the following mismatch equations: The AC system of equations:
Fig. 5. Flow chart of the PFC for the unied ADU.

(16) and of the non-PCC buses are where set to zero. Moreover, of the PCC bus whose converter is in the PV control mode is set to zero. The DC system of equations for the non-slack DC buses: (17) The total loss of the slack converter station: (18) is calculated in a similar manner as where shown in (12). Fig. 5 shows the ow chart of PFC for unied ADU using the solver fsolve in MATLAB. Termination tolerance on and is set to , and the maximum number of iterations is set to 10. Moreover, after each PFC the argument exitag is checked to be sure that fsolve converged to a root. V. UNIFIED AC-DC UNIT FOR PFC OF AC/DC GRID WITH ASYNCHRONOUS AC SYSTEMS A. Separated Analysis In this analysis the entire hybrid AC/DC system shown in Fig. 2 is divided into two separated groups (see Fig. 6): g1) External AC system consisting of the asynchronous AC systems 2 to . g2) ADU consisting of the AC system 1 and the MTDC system. Since the active power and reactive power (or the voltage) at each PCC bus in g1) are specied, the power ow calculation of the external AC system can be independently performed. Thus, the power ow calculation of the entire hybrid AC/DC system is conducted in two steps:

2380

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 3, AUGUST 2013

Fig. 6. AC/DC grid divided into two groups.

Fig. 8. Test system in case a).

Fig. 7. Flow chart of the separated method.

s1) In this step, the conventional PFC is conducted in the . external AC system to obtain s2) In this step, the obtained are used for PFC of the unied ADU (i.e., g2)). 1) External AC System: The only relation between the external AC system and the MTDC network is the injected current from the corresponding PCC bus into the converter . Having performed a successful load ow calculation for these AC systems, the DC power can be obtained in a similar way as shown in (8). The obtained DC powers (i.e., ) can then be considered as the injected/absorbed DC powers at the corresponding DC buses of the unied ADU. 2) Unied AC-DC Unit: In this stage, rst the ADU is made up of the AC system 1 and the MTDC system. Here, the AC state variables are dened only based on the AC system 1. Then all steps of the ow chart shown in Fig. 5, with only one modication in the block b) in which is replaced by , are performed. The ow chart of the separated analysis for case b) is shown in Fig. 7. B. Integrated Analysis In this analysis, all asynchronous AC systems (i.e., the AC systems 1 to ) are included in the AC part of the unied ADU,

Fig. 9. Test system in case b).

and all mismatch equations are simultaneously solved in a similar manner as in case a). VI. CASE STUDY Recently, there have been some plans (or discussions) to apply MTDC systems to the Nordic power system [22]. Therefore, in this paper, simulations in both cases are performed on the well meshed AC grid NORDIC 32A-CIGRE test system. In both cases, the generator at bus 4041 (which is a synchronous condenser) has been disconnected. As shown in Fig. 8 for testing case a), a three terminal MTDC with delta conguration is embedded in the nordic system. The converter VSC1 connected to bus 4032 controls the DC voltage at the DC bus D1 in the MTDC grid. The other two converters, i.e., VSC2 and VSC3, are connected to the AC buses 4044 and 4061, respectively. These two converters control the absorbed/injected active power at their PCC buses (i.e., the AC buses 4044 and 4061). The operation modes and the PCC type of each converter station used in both cases are given in Table I.

BARADAR AND GHANDHARI: MULTI-OPTION UNIFIED POWER FLOW APPROACH

2381

TABLE I OPERATION MODES OF CONVERTERS AND PCC TYPE

CASE A):

TABLE IV BASED ON SIMPOW RESULTS

TABLE II CONVERTER STATION PARAMETERS

TABLE V CASE B): SOME OBTAINED RESULTS FROM MATLAB

TABLE III CASE A): SOME RESULTS FROM MATLAB (M) AND SIMPOW (S)

system) via a four terminal MTDC grid. The converter VSC1 and VSC2 which control the active power are connected to the buses 4041 and 4044, respectively. The MTDC system is connected to the other AC system via the converters VSC3 (P control converter) and VSC4 (slack converter). According to the ABB High Voltage Cable (HVC) product range, the DC voltage levels are 80 kV, 150 kV and 320 kV [20]. In this paper, the M9 module data with the voltage level of 320 kV [20] is chosen in both cases. The data for the other elements of this module can be found in [20]. In case a), the rst converter (VSC1) controls the DC voltage at 320 kV, and for the other converters the active powers are set to MW and MW based on the power direction shown in Fig. 4. In case b), the converter VSC4 operates in DC voltage control mode with the specied DC voltage 320 kV, and for the other converters the active powers are set to MW, MW and MW. VII. SIMULATION RESULTS For case b), the same parameters for the converters are used except for the converter loss model which is based on the data from [21]. In case b) as shown in Fig. 9, the Nordic system is asynchronously connected to a small AC grid (IEEE 9-bus In order to evaluate the applicability of the proposed method, the algorithm has been simulated using fsolve function in MATLAB. To show the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method, for case a) the simulations have also been performed in SIMPOW. To make almost the same system as in SIMPOW,

2382

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 3, AUGUST 2013

TABLE VI CASE B): COMPARISON BETWEEN THE SEPARATED AND INTEGRATED ANALYSES

the converter loss model given in (12) has been considered in case a). The VSC parameters used in both cases are shown in Table II. For case a) the data are from the SIMPOW model, and for case b) the data given in [20] have been used. Moreover, in case b) the loss model dened in (11) has been used. For case a), some obtained results are given in Table III from which it may be concluded that there are only small differences between the results from MATLAB and SIMPOW. The small differences may arise from that the VSCs in SIMPOW (compared to our model) have a more detailed model with some constraints. As shown in the table, the voltage magnitudes of the PCC buses in SIMPOW have not been kept at the prespecied values although all VSCs have been on voltage control mode. Having used the obtained voltage magnitudes at the PCC buses in SIMPOW as in our model in MATLAB, the results shown in Table IV were obtained. Obviously, the obtained results are identical. For case b) which has only been simulated in MATLAB, we found identical results using the separated and integrated methods, respectively. Some of the obtained results are given in Table V. Table VI (Part I) shows a comparison between the separated and integrated methods regarding the number of iterations and the computational time. As shown in the table, there are relatively large differences between two analyses. As the number of buses and system gets larger, the difference in the computational time even gets larger. In order to show that, the small AC system shown in Fig. 9 has been replaced by another Nordic test system, and the simulation results are given in Table VI (Part II). As was expected computational time related to separated analysis is much less than the integrated analysis. As the network becomes larger and more complicated the difference in computational time becomes higher accordingly. VIII. COMMENTS 1) Thanks to one of the reviewers of this paper, we were informed about [23] which also proposed a unied method for an AC/DC grid with embedded MTDC grid. However, in their method a simple converter loss representation has been presented, mathematically similar to (9) of our paper, but with an equivalent impedance between PCC bus and bus C (see Fig. 4). Moreover, for each converter three additional equations (but with four state variables) must be

used to handle the converter losses. The equations are solvable if is prespecied which means their proposed method is not able to solve PFC when the converters are on AC voltage control mode, i.e., controlling the voltage magnitudes at PCC buses. If is prespecied then the system has three additional state variables for each converter. However in our method, regardless of the number of converters, only one additional equation or state variable [see (18)] is used. Furthermore, any kind of converter control modes and converter loss representations can be used in our proposed method. 2) In our proposed model, any kind of controllable devices (such as FACTS devices) and load modeling in AC systems, and independent MTDC grids can be included. With independent MTDC grids we will only introduce additional equations or state variables regardless of the . number of converters. In this paper, we had Moreover, voltage margin or droop control modes of VSCs can easily be included in our model. 3) Case b was also simulated in SIMPOW with the converter loss model (12). As was expected, there were very small differences in the obtained results (similar to case a)). Due to lack of space, the results have not been shown in the paper. 4) It should be noted that the losses of shown in Fig. 3 are modeled as a parallel resistance same as one used in SIMPOW with the value . IX. CONCLUSION The paper has presented a new PFC approach for AC/DC grids incorporating VSC-based MTDC systems including converter losses. In the previously publish works (presented in Section I), the sequential method has been applied to handle converter losses. The sequential method requires a high number of iterative loops which make the algorithm not only complicated and time consuming, but also unreliable. To overcome these problems, this paper has proposed a new unied method by adding only a new equation (or state variable) to handle any kind of converter loss modelings, and any kind of converter control modes regardless of the number of VSCs. This method can also handle a synchronous (asynchronous) hybrid AC/DC

BARADAR AND GHANDHARI: MULTI-OPTION UNIFIED POWER FLOW APPROACH

2383

system connected via independent VSC-based MTDC systems by adding new state variables. The paper has rstly introduced a general unied AC-DC unit (ADU) which has been applied to two different cases namely: a hybrid AC/DC grid with embedded MTDC system, and asynchronous hybrid AC/DC grids connected via a common MTDC system. Then the proposed model for ADU has been used in two different analyses named integrated analysis and separated analysis. Although both analyses can be used in the practical analysis of the real-size power systems, as shown in the paper, the separated analysis however offers minimum modication in the conventional AC PFC programs and a shorter computational time. A such analysis is also very suitable for future plan in which a very large AC system is connected to several remote asynchronous AC systems such as offshore wind farms and other remote renewable energy sources through a common MTDC grid. The comparison between the obtained results by this proposed method and those by the commercial software SIMPOW has shown the correctness and robustness of the proposed method. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank L. Lindkvist at STRI for all Simpow-support. REFERENCES
[1] W. Lu and B.-T. Ooi, Optimal acquisition and aggregation of offshore wind power by multiterminal voltage-source HVDC, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 201206, Jan. 2003. [2] ABB power technologies AB, Technical description of HVDC light technology tech. rep., Apr. 2005. [Online]. Available: http://www.abb. com. [3] N. G. H. L. Gyugyi, Understanding FACTS. New York, NY, USA: Wiley-IEEE Press, 1999. [4] T. J. Harnmons et al., Role of hvdc transmission in future energy development, IEEE Power Eng. Rev., pp. l025, Feb. 2000. [5] D. V. Hertem and M. Ghandhari, Multi-terminal VSC HVDC for the European supergrid: Obstacles, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev., vol. 14, no. 9, pp. 31563163, Dec. 2010. [6] S. Zadkhast, M. Fotuhi-Firuzabad, F. Aminifar, R. Billinton, S. Faried, and A. Edris, Reliability evaluation of an HVDC transmission system tapped by a VSC station, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 19621970, Jul. 2010. [7] S. Cole, J. Beerten, and R. Belmans, Generalized dynamic VSC MTDC model for power system stability studies, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 16551662, Aug. 2010. [8] L. Chongru, Z. Boming, H. Yunhe, F. Wu, and L. Yingshang, An improved approach for AC-DC power ow calculation with multi-infeed DC systems, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 862869, May 2011. [9] T. Smed, G. Andersson, G. B. Sheble, and L. L. Grigshy, A new approach to AC/DC power ow, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 12381244, Aug. 1991. [10] M. El-Marsafawy and R. Mathur, A new, fast technique for loadow solution of integrated multi-terminal AC/DC systems, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-99, no. 1, pp. 246255, Jan. 1980.

[11] J. Arrillaga, C. Arnold, and B. Harker, Computer Modeling of Electrical Power Systems. New York, NY, USA: Wiley, 1983. [12] Y.-S. Tzeng, N. Chen, and R.-N. Wu, A detailed r-l fed bridge converter model for power ow studies in industrial AC/DC power systems, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 531538, Oct. 1995. [13] C. M. Ong and A. Hamzei-Nejad, A general-purpose multiterminal DC load-ow, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-100, no. 7, pp. 31663174, Jul. 1981. [14] M. E. El-Hawary and S. T. Ibrahim, A new approach to AC-DC load ow analysis, Elect. Power Syst. Res., vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 193200, 1995. [15] Q. Chen, G.-Q. Tang, and W. Xun, AC-DC power ow algorithm for multi-terminal VSC-HVDC systems, Elect. Power Autom. Equip., vol. 25, no. 6, p. 6, 2005. [16] L. Gengyin, Z. Ming, H. Jie, L. Guangkai, and L. Haifeng, Power ow calculation of power systems incorporating VSC-HVDC, in Proc. Int. Conf. Power System Technology (PowerCon), Nov. 2004, vol. 2, pp. 15621566. [17] J. Beerten, S. Cole, and R. Belmans, A sequential AC/DC power ow algorithm for networks containing multi-terminal VSC HVDC systems, in Proc. IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Jul. 2010, pp. 17. [18] M. Baradar, M. Ghandhari, and D. Van Hertem, The modeling multiterminal VSC-HVDC in power ow calculation using unied methodology, in Proc. 2011 2nd IEEE PES Int. Conf. Exhib. Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT Europe), Dec. 2011, pp. 16. [19] The simpow website. [Online]. Available: http://www.simpow.com/. [20] P. Haugland, Its Time to ConnectTechnical Description of HVDC Light Technology ABB, Tech. Rep. 7, 2008. [21] M. R. S. C. G. Daelemans, K. Srivastava, and R. Belmans, Minimization of steady-state losses in meshed networks using VSC HVDC, in Proc. IEEE PES General Meeting 09, Jul. 2009. [22] Svenska kraftnt constructs the south-west link. [Online]. Available: http://www.svk.se/Start/English/News/Press-releases/SvenskaKraftnat-constructs-the-South-West-Link/. [23] F. Ye, Z. N. Wei, and G. Q. Sun, Improved power ow algorithm incorporating multi-terminal VSC-HVDC, Adv. Mater. Res., vol. 383390, pp. 21882194, Nov. 2011. Mohamadreza Baradar (S11) received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2010. He is pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. He is currently a member of the Electric Power System Department at KTH. His research interests include power system operation, integration of renewable energy sources, DC grids, and multi-terminal VSC HVDC systems.

Mehrdad Ghandhari (M00) received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, in 1995, and 2000, respectively. He is currently a full Professor at KTH. His research interests include power system dynamics, stability and control, and FACTS and HVDC systems.