Planning and design methodology for a European HVDC overlay grid

The increased number of renewable energy sources causes regional imbalances in power generation. HVDC based systems present one option to provide the transmission capacity needed to compensate these imbalances. This paper presents a methodology for the design of an embedded HVDC overlay grid. An aggregated model of the European transmission network and load/generation scenarios for the year 2020 are used. Based on these a three step planning procedure for the overlay grid is presented. This methodology is evaluated with an exemplary design based on the considered network and scenarios. The resulting overlay grid proves the effectiveness of the proposed methology.