Mixed AC/DC OPF using differential evolution for global minima identification

There are a lot of challenges coming up for the transmission system in Europe. This is mainly caused by tremendous increasing infeed from renewable energies in remote areas as the North Sea and increasing cross border energy trades. A suitable solution is a meshed onshore HVDC grid spanning the existing AC transmission grid. This new transmission layer must be actively included in grid´s operation management in order to make use of its whole advantages. A part of it is operation planning for meshed HVDC grids integrated in an AC system. Therefore a mixed AC/DC optimal power flow can be used. As conventional optimization methods for such kind of optimization problems converge in local minima or do not converge at all, this paper proposed application of an artificial intelligence optimization algorithm namely differential evolution.