An Integrated AC/DC Super-Grid System -A Mechanism to Solving the North American Power Crisis

The North American electrical grid which used to serve as a reference point for world electrical grid system has become riddled with uncertainties in its performance. This precarious situation is sequel to the series of unprecedented system failures which in many cases have resulted in total system collapse - blackouts. The climax of these ugly events was the infamous and wide-spread outage of August 14th, 2003. In view of the failure of the various actions plans initiated by post 2003 outage committees to solve this problem, the Authors have come out with a model aimed at utilizing the fundamental features of an integrated AC/DC super-grid scheme to address this problem. A ring structure as proposed by Presidential Committee was adopted here. However, the incorporation of optical current transducers (OCTs) and smart systems with energy storage device (ESD) and energy source device (ESD) are unique features of this design. The analysis and simulation of the converter which is the basic component of an AC/DC interconnection system have been performed using the multilevel neutral point clamped (NPC) converter and generalized discontinuous pulse width modulation (GDPWM) schemes. The results obtained proved the capability of this model to reduce avoidable system outages under varying conditions.