Pumped Hydro Storage Power Plants Emulation Platform
© 2018 EPFL
Power Electronics Laboratory receives research funding from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy
Power Electronics Laboratory at EPFL has received seed funding from the Swiss Federal Office for Energy (SFOE) for the project titled "Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop Emulation Platform for Pumped Hydro Storage Power Plants”. Project goal is to establish medium voltage emulation platform for pumped hydro storage power plants (PHSP), that will enable investigations on the power electronic technologies that can (i) modernize and optimize existing installations in Switzerland or worldwide, (ii) improve the efficiency of the overall system and (iii) increase the offering of ancillary services for the utilities. A complete PHSP emulation platform will allow to test various PHSP operating modes and in particular its interactions with the grid. It will be realized at medium voltage of 6kV and with ratings of 0.5MVA. The hydraulic part of the PHSP system will be emulated by means of the induction machine (2) fed by ABB ACS2000 medium voltage converter (3), with references generated from the real-time simulator of the complete system with different PHSP configurations (6). The synchronous generator (4) in the system will be connected through a 4Q modular multilevel converter (5) to a 6kV 4Q high performance grid emulator (7). PHSP emulation platform will greatly enhance research capabilities and offering of the medium voltage research facilities of Power Electronics Laboratory (1).