electronics Article Technical and Economic Assessment of VSC-HVDC Transmission Model: A Case Study of South-Western Region in Pakistan Mehr Gul 1,2,* , Nengling Tai 1, Wentao Huang 1, Muhammad Haroon Nadeem 1 , Muhammad Ahmad 1 and Moduo Yu 1 1 School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;
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[email protected] (M.Y.) 2 Department of Electrical Engineering, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Quetta 87300, Pakistan * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-13262736005 Received: 10 October 2019; Accepted: 5 November 2019; Published: 7 November 2019 Abstract: The southwestern part of Pakistan is still not connected to the national grid, despite its abundance in renewable energy resources. However, this area becomes more important for energy projects due to the development of the deep-sea Gwadar port and the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). In this paper, a voltage source converter (VSC) based high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission model is proposed to link this area to the national gird. A two-terminal VSC-HVDC model is used as a case study, in which a two-level converter with standard double-loop control is employed. The proposed model has a capacity of transferring bulk power of 3500 MW at 350 kV from Gwadar to Matiari. Furthermore, the discounted cash flow analysis of VSC-HVDC against the HVAC system shows that the proposed system is economically sustainable.