Reliability Assessment of LCC Based HVDC Systems Using Public Failure Data

Lack of representative and sufficient failure data is a common problem faced by researchers in the area of HVDC systems reliability analysis. To alleviate this problem, researchers usually resort to the collection of data from different publicly available sources, such as organizations’ reports and from other research articles. However, homogeneity of the information gathered in this way is not guaranteed, given the diverse sources; the generality of any conclusions based on this data is thus affected. In this paper, the adequacy of publicly available failure data for use in reliability analyses of LCC based HVDC systems is assessed. To this end, failure data available in public domain is first collated. Results from the reliability analysis of two bi-pole topologies of LCC based HVDC systems, with different levels of redundancy and operating voltages, are reported.