Power Flow Controller for Meshed Systems with a Fractionally Rated BTB Converter

The increasing load demand, increasing level of penetration of renewable energy and limited transmission infrastructure investments have significantly increased the need for a smart dynamically controllable grid. Existing solutions based on FACTS devices, are complex and expensive to implement at transmission level or even sub-transmission level voltages. This paper proposes a novel power flow controller for dynamic control of active/reactive power in a meshed network. The proposed controller is realized by augmenting a transformer with a fractionally rated bi-directional Back to Back (BTB) converter. The main advantages of the proposed converter are the fractional converter rating, reliability and scalability.