Assessing the Role of Meshing in HVDC Grids: Impacts on Offshore Wind Curtailment in the North Sea

However, the inherent fluctuating nature of offshore wind power requires efficient grid operation strategies to minimize curtailment and maximize the transmission of power to the different load centres.

This paper investigates the value of different degrees of meshing in the topology of offshore

MTDC grids, and their effect on offshore wind generation curtailment, from a high-level planning perspective. To evaluate this approach, a synthetic test case of the offshore grid in the

North Sea is built. In the test case, each country is represented in a zonal manner through a single bus. The installed capacities for each generation source are taken from the ENTSO-e

TYNDP 2024 data, together with the renewable energy sources and demand time series. The future offshore grid is built by assigning dedicated electrical energy hubs (EEH) to several countries in the North Sea, and connecting them to already planned projects. Each EEH consists of a main DC busbar to which an offshore wind farm and several high voltage direct current

(HVDC) links are connected. Starting from an initial offshore topology where every EEH is connected to the other EEHs and its dedicated country, the grid is simplified by removing the least utilized HVDC links while preserving a meshed structure with a minimum level of meshing.

Year-long optimal power flow (OPF) simulations are performed for multiple years (2040 and 2050) and climate years (2008 and 2009) of the ENTSO-e TYNDP Distributed Energy scenario, and installed offshore wind capacities of 2, 3, 4, and 5 GW for each EEH.

The results demonstrate that reducing offshore grid meshing leads to higher utilization of the remaining HVDC links and a marginal increase in offshore wind curtailment, especially with higher offshore wind installed capacities.

Overall, our findings indicate that while a certain level of meshing is beneficial for operational flexibility, fully interconnecting all the offshore electrical energy hubs does not yield proportionate reductions in curtailment. Therefore, this paper highlights the importance of efficient offshore grid planning and shows how high-level OPF-based analyses using public data can support early-stage decision-making for offshore transmission expansion projects.