High Voltage Substation Equipment

“Developing substation technologies that respond to the constraints of future DC networks and respect the environment is at the heart of the High Voltage Substation Equipment research programme’s concerns.”
Alain Girodet, Programme Director – High Voltage Substation Equipment
The High Voltage Substation Equipment research programme at SuperGrid Institute at faces many challenges. First is how to clear fault currents from meshed DC networks using circuit breakers. Different circuit breaker technologies and protection strategies will be developed to reduce the cost of infrastructure and preserve the stability and availability of the network.
The second challenge is the development of gas-insulated substations for DC applications. Substantial efforts are being made to understand, model and optimise the insulation systems that will be applied to various components of the gas insulation substation. Equipment such as disconnectors, earthing switches and instrument transformers will have to be adapted to work within the new constraints of DC networks.
The third focus area is related to researching and implementing new solid and gas insulation systems that provide enhanced electrical performance and resilience, and developing interruption principles that have a low environmental impact.
All these developments rely on the dielectric and power test laboratories for performance validation and the characterisation platform for the definition of insulating material properties.

Latest Posts
SuperGrid Institute’s DC circuit breaker goes public at the IEEE General Meeting in Denver
We are proud to be revealing our 525kV DC circuit breaker at the IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting.
Partial discharge measurement in DC GIS: comparison between conventional and UHF methods
The aim of this paper is to investigate the partial discharge signals recorded with both conventional and UHF methods in DC voltage.
Simulation methodology for HVDC cable accessories: focus on oscillating polarity reversal and fast transient overvoltages
The aim of this paper is to propose a time decoupled simulation method to compute the electric field in case of OPR and S/IMP without losing in result accuracy.