Impedance Modeling and Stability Analysis of Energy Controlled Modular Multilevel Converter

In recent years, the modular multilevel converter (MMC) has been widely used in high-voltage dc (HVDC) transmission, which, however, brings about various stability issues, such as sub-synchronous oscillation (SSO). To deal with these stability issues, many active and passive damping methods have been proposed. In fact, the MMC itself has more control degrees of freedom compared to the two-level voltage-source converter (VSC), such as internal energy, circulating current, etc., which can be exploited to improve the system stability. Based on the idea, the internal energy of MMC is utilized to suppress the SSOs in this paper. The frequency-coupling impedance model of MMC with energy controller is first developed based on the harmonic state-space (HSS) method by considering the internal dynamics and all control links, which is verified by frequency scanning result in simulation. The stability analysis of the energy controlled MMC-HVDC for wind farm integration is conducted and a modified energy control structure of MMC is also proposed to further improve the stability of the interconnected system.