IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO.

2, APRIL 2006 987

Optimal Integration of an Offshore

Wind Farm to a Weak AC Grid
X. I. Koutiva, Student Member, IEEE, T. D. Vrionis, Nicholas A. Vovos, Senior Member, IEEE, and
Gabriel B. Giannakopoulos, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—This paper studies the behavior of a high-voltage di- Classical HVdc links are not suitable for this type of trans-
rect current link based on voltage-source converters, which feeds mission application, as they require a high short-circuit ratio
a weak ac network with power produced from an offshore wind between the two ends. On the contrary, the technology of HVdc
farm (WF) of induction generators. Its control system, which is
based on adaptive fuzzy controllers, manages to offer very satis- based on voltage-source converters (VSCs) can be a feasible
factory performance, without the need for a detailed mathemat- solution [1]–[3]. It presents the advantages of dc transmis-
ical model, but just prior knowledge of the behavior of the elec- sion and due to the high switching capability of the VSCs’
trical system. Using the simulation program PSCAD/EMTDC, the insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), it can instantly reg-
study was performed under both steady-state and transient condi- ulate the reactive power and, consequently, the ac voltage,
tions. The results show that the link supplies the variable power of
the WF to a weak grid, keeping the ac voltage fluctuations in the independent of the real power flow. So the short-circuit ratio
point of common coupling at an acceptable level. Moreover, due to between the two ends of the link does not have to be high.
the ability of the control system to adjust the stator frequency of Furthermore, the power quality and system stability can be
the induction generators in relation to the wind velocity, maximum improved via continuously adjustable reactive power support
wind power acquisition is achieved. with ac voltage feedback control.
Index Terms—DC–AC power conversion, fuzzy control, HVdc While some control methods for HVdc links based on VSCs
transmission, induction machines, voltage control, wind power connecting WFs of synchronous generators to strong ac sys-
generation. tems have been relatively discussed in the literature [4], [5],
the topology regarded in this paper has not been studied so far.
I. INTRODUCTION Aiming to cope with a more demanding case, the connection of
a WF of induction generators to a weak ac grid via an HVdc link

D URING the last decade, due to the increased energy de-

mand and environmental concern, wind farms (WFs) have
penetrated to the field of power generation worldwide. Wind
based on VSCs was studied.
The system under study is a highly complex, nonlinear
system. The wind is a fluctuating and unstable power source so
power is integrated into electricity grids and accounts for a no-
when a WF feeds a weak ac grid, the supply of power to the ac
ticeable share of the total power generation. Suitable places for
network becomes even more difficult. For this reason, a quick,
big clusters of windmills installations are uninhabited islands
flexible and adaptive control system is required, which is able
and offshore platforms, because they offer high, uniform wind
to cope with imprecise and noisy data and, at the same time, a
speed and acceptable visual impact. In this case, the underwater
control system which can be online tuned in order to present
transmission of power to the mainland grid has to be by cable.
optimum performance under any operating conditions. Taking
For long distances, ac transmission cannot be used to bring
into account the above requirements, the implementation of the
the wind power ashore, as long-distance cables produce large
control system was based on adaptive fuzzy controllers (AFCs).
amounts of capacitive Vars. So dc transmission is the only ap-
They combine the advantages of classical controllers with an
plicable solution.
inherent ability to deal with imprecise and noisy data. Further-
On the other hand, the dominating kind of wind power gener-
more, they are self-tuned online in order to achieve optimum
ators is that of asynchronous generators since they are robust and
performance under any circumstances. So this dynamic type of
cost-effective. Induction generators, however, do not contribute
control, due to its ability to easily adapt to the quickly changing
to the regulation of grid voltage nor frequency and they are sub-
and fluctuating values of the wind velocity, offers the possibility
stantial absorbers of reactive power. Furthermore, areas with
to achieve, apart from an acceptable voltage waveform to the
good wind resources are geographically far from the consumers
point of common coupling (PCC), an optimum wind power
and are in regions where the power grid is relatively weak. This
acquisition that drives the WFs to maximum aerodynamic
generates many problems, such as voltage drop, voltage flicker,
efficiency.
harmonic distortion, and frequency deviation. Compensation is
then needed to preserve power quality in the network. II. DESCRIPTION OF A VSC-BASED HVDC LINK
An HVDC link based on VSCs connecting a WF with an ac
Manuscript received December 13, 2004; revised April 4, 2005. Paper no. network is shown in Fig. 1. It consists of a WF at the sending
TPWRD-00587-2004. end, an ac network at the receiving end, the VSC stations, and
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Patras, Rion 26500, Greece (e-mail: [email protected]). the intermediate high-voltage dc link. Each converter station
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2005.859275 consists of a VSC, an interface transformer, dc capacitors, and
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
988 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 2, APRIL 2006

sends more power to the dc link, the dc voltage at the point G

increases. The control system of detects the deviation of
the dc voltage from its reference value and gives an order to in-
crease the phase angle of the pulsewidth-modulated (PWM)
sinusoidal reference signal and, consequently, the phase angle
of the fundamental ac output voltage of , with re-
spect to the ac voltage at the other side of the transformer, Vni.
Thus, according to (1), more power is absorbed by the ac grid,
the dc capacitors will discharge, and the dc voltage will return
Fig. 1. VSC-based HVdc link.
to its reference value. As the dc voltage at the point G is kept at
a constant value, the active power flow between the two VSCs
is automatically balanced, without the need of a telecommuni-
cation line between the stations.
In addition, , by regulating the angular frequency at
the point K (Fig. 1), changes the amount of power absorbed
by the WF and can achieve maximum wind power absorption
according to the wind speed.
Both VSCs control the ac voltage at their sides by regulating
the modulation index “m” of the sinusoidal PWM reference
signal and, consequently, the modulation signal of the magni-
tude of ac voltage generated by the converters. The amplitude
Fig. 2. (a) One level of a VSC bridge. (b) Structure of a VSC valve. of the ac voltage in each converter station is compared to a refer-
ence value and the error is passed into a regulator, whose output
ac filters. The two VSCs are connected with two coaxial cables. is the modulation index “m.” If the voltage generated by the con-
The bridge of the VSCs is of two levels six-pulse type, with verter is lower than its reference value, the modulation index is
series-connected insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) in increased in order to increase the generated ac voltage. Respec-
each valve Fig. 2(a) and(b). Each IGBT is provided with an an- tively, when the ac voltage exceeds its reference value, “m” is
tiparallel diode. decreased.

III. CONTROL PRINCIPLES OF A VSC-BASED HVDC LINK IV. CONTROL SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The active power P flowing between each converter and its The control system is based on fuzzy logic (FL). This type of
adjacent ac network is controlled by changing the phase angle control, approaching the human reasoning that makes use of the
, between the fundamental frequency voltage generated by the tolerance, uncertainty, imprecision, and fuzziness in the deci-
converter, Vg, and the ac bus voltage, Vn, (Fig. 1). Neglecting sion-making process, manages to offer a very satisfactory per-
the losses at the transformer, the active power is calculated formance, without the need of a detailed mathematical model
according to (1) of the system, just by incorporating the experts’ knowledge into
fuzzy rules. In addition, it has inherent abilities to deal with im-
(1) precise or noisy data; thus, it is able to extend its control ca-
pability even to those operating conditions where linear control
where is the transformer leakage reactance. techniques fail (i.e., large parameter variations).
The control of power angle is achieved by regulating the an- The main drawback of an FL-based control system is that the
gular frequency of the ac voltage created by the VSC. For ex- tuning of its membership functions (MFs) needs too much “trial
ample, when the wind power increases, the angular frequency at and error.” In order to reduce the time-consuming process of
the point tends to increase. This is detected by , which the MFs tuning or to ameliorate the performance when it does
gives an order to increase the phase angle of the PWM sinu- not satisfy the specification, we can apply an online-tuned adap-
soidal reference signal and, consequently, the phase angle tive fuzzy control system (AFCS). AFCSs can adapt to their en-
of the fundamental ac voltage of , with respect to vironment and acquire new knowledge by themselves through
the ac voltage at the bus of the WF . According to (1), by learning. A possible arrangement of such a system is the imple-
increasing the phase angle , more power is driven to the dc mentation of a fuzzy controller (FC) to adjust the parameters of
system and, consequently, the angular frequency returns to its another FC. This adjustment is accomplished online. The main
reference value. FCs MFs are tuned online through the supervisor-FC, which fol-
In normal operation mode, the active power, which is supplied lows the reasoning of an expert which would manually tune the
to the HVdc link, must be equal to the active power received by MFs. This type of control offers, except for the automatic MFs
the network at the other side of the link plus the losses. This adjustment, an adapting tuning of the MFs, according to the be-
power balance is achieved by keeping constant the voltage at havior of the system. AFCs are thus very suitable for the con-
the point G (Fig. 1). Therefore, is designated the role of trol of systems which are strongly fluctuating, such as systems
the dc voltage regulator at this point. For example, when the WF of large WFs of induction generators.
KOUTIVA et al.: OPTIMAL INTEGRATION OF AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM TO A WEAK AC GRID 989

Fig. 3. HVDC link based on VSCs and its control circuit block diagram.

phase shift of the phase angle (positive for

increment of and negative for decrement of
);
regulating factor of MFs;
step change of ;
variance of ;
absolute mean deviation of from .
The frequency at the point , is compared to , and
the error is passed through , which produces a signal
(Fig. 3). By accumulating the successive values of , the
value of comes up, according to (2)
(2)
where is the new value of the phase angle and is
Fig. 4. Angular frequency regulator control system AFCS . the previous value of the phase angle .
As was previously mentioned, is the angular frequency
at the point K (Fig. 1), when the WF operates at the maximum
The overall control system proposed in this paper consists aerodynamic efficiency for a specific wind speed.
of two AFCSs and two simple fuzzy control systems (FCS), The value of is dynamically approached in real time from
Fig. 3. Each of them will be described in detail in the following (Fig. 4), using a maximum power point tracking (MPPT)
paragraphs. technique. This is achieved by changing the reference value of
the frequency at the point K by and monitoring the corre-
A. Angular Frequency Regulator sponding change of the WF real power output, P. If an increment
of the reference frequency causes an increment to the power P,
As was mentioned in the previous paragraph, in order to the search is continued in the same direction. Otherwise, the di-
achieve maximum wind power absorption according to the rection of the search is reversed. This searching method drives
wind speed, regulates the angular frequency at the point at the end to oscillate near the optimum value.
K (Fig. 1). This is managed through an AFCS, AFCS (Fig. 3). The structure of the FCs is described in detail in the
This system consists of , which is the main controller following paragraphs.
of the AFCS, , whose main role is to fine-tune and 1) Structure of : is the main FC of the angular fre-
, which dynamically detects online the angular frequency quency regulator control system. Its inputs are the deviation of
at the point K that corresponds to the maximum aerodynamic from its reference and its derivative. Its output is
efficiency of the WF for a specific wind speed (Fig. 4). the phase shift of .
The meaning of the symbols shown at Fig. 4 is the following: The initial MFs for the input are shown in Fig. 5.
P real power at the point K; The term initial is used because these MFs are tuned online
angular frequency at the point K; by . These MFs are the initial MFs before their tuning. Of
angular frequency at the point K for maximum course, the general form of the final MFs will remain the same.
aerodynamic efficiency; As shown in Fig. 5, five fuzzy subsets are needed for the input
phase angle , mentioned in the previous para- : negative big (NB), negative small (NS), (OK), posi-
graph; tive small (PS), and positive big (PB).
990 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 2, APRIL 2006

Fig. 5. Membership functions for the fuzzy set ! 0! . Fig. 7. Membership functions for the fuzzy set phase angle  .

TABLE I
FUZZY RULES FOR FC

Fig. 6. Membership functions for the fuzzy set derivative of ! 0! .

monitors the system and modulates the MFs in order to make

For the derivative of the , the fuzzy sets needed are the system more or less “strict” according to the circumstances.
NB, NS, PS, and PB, and they are shown in Fig. 6. The inputs of are the following:
The fuzzy sets required for the phase angle are decrease
• the absolute mean deviation of from its reference
very fast (DVF), decrease fast (DF), decrease slowly (DS), de-
;
crease very slowly (DVS), OK, increase very slowly (IVS), in-
• the variance of , and the output of this controller is
crease slowly (IS), increase fast (IF), and increase very fast
the signal (Fig. 4). By accumulating the successive
(IVF), and they are shown in Fig. 7.
values of , according to (3), the regulating factor
In order to form the fuzzy control rules, the following points
is produced, which will optimize MFs. The vari-
must be taken into account:
ance of , and the output of this controller is
If the angular frequency is much higher than its nom-
inal value, no matter if it is accelerating or deceler-
ating, the correction action must be strong. The ma- (3)
chines must be decelerated by quickly increasing the
electrical power flow into the dc link. As was men-
tioned in the previous paragraph, this is managed by Specifically, increases or decreases the range of the
increasing the phase angle very quickly . MFs which correspond to the output in order to render
If the angular frequency at the point K is higher than “stricter” or “looser.” For example, in case of a large
its nominal value and is accelerating, it must be decel- variation of the wind velocity, the system must become
erated by increasing the phase angle . “stricter.” To achieve this, the range of increased, pro-
If the angular frequency is almost equal to its nominal ducing bigger variations of . The priority of this con-
value and is quickly accelerating, the phase angle must troller is to regulate the MFs in order to drive
be increased very slowly in order to avoid the oscilla- as close to its reference as possible. When this goal is
tions near the set point. achieved, can be further fine-tuned in order to mini-
This reasoning is extended for all possible combinations of the mize the width of fluctuations of near its reference.
angular frequency and its rate. The corresponding outputs are Gaussian MFs are used for both inputs and outputs. Three
selected as given in Table I. fuzzy subsets are needed for each input: big (B), medium (M)
2) Structure of : The role of is to fine-tune on line and small(S). The fuzzy sets required for are PB, positive
the MFs of . The online tuning of the MFs is a good way medium (PM), PS, (OK), NS, and NB. The fuzzy control rules
to deal with the continuing variation of the system parameters. are shown in Table II.
Obviously, there is no combination of parameters that ensures 3) Structure of : The role of is to compute the an-
optimum performance under any operating conditions. Through gular frequency reference value online , used by .
, it is possible to online tune MFs in order to optimize The inputs of this controller are the following:
its parameters under any circumstances. In fact, acts similar • the last change of ;
to an experienced control system designer, who continuously • the corresponding change of real power ;
KOUTIVA et al.: OPTIMAL INTEGRATION OF AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM TO A WEAK AC GRID 991

TABLE II
FUZZY RULES FOR FC

Fig. 8. DC voltage regulator control system AFCS .

TABLE III TABLE IV

FUZZY CONTROL RULES OF FC INPUTS AND OUTPUTS OF FC AND FC

Fig. 9. AC voltage regulators (FCS ).

and its output is the current change of Gaussian MFs
are used for both inputs and outputs.
As we can see in Fig. 8, consists of a main FC
The fuzzy sets used by inputs and outputs are the following: and an additional FC , which is responsible for the online
PVB positive very big; tuning of the MFs. The structure of and is very
PB positive big;
similar to the structure of and its tuning controller ,
PM positive medium;
respectively, and they will not be analyzed further. Only their
PS positive small; inputs and outputs are sited in Table IV.
P positive;
ZE zero; C. AC Voltage Regulators
NVB negative very big;
NB negative big; The ac voltage regulators in each converter station compare
NM negative medium; the amplitude of the ac voltage generated by the VSCs to the
NS negative small; amplitude of a reference voltage and apply the error into an FC
N negative. (Fig. 9). The output of the regulator is the modulation index “m”
The fuzzy control rules used by are shown in Table III. of the sinusoidal PWM reference signal and, consequently, the
modulation signal of the magnitude of the ac voltage generated
B. DC Voltage Regulator by the VSCs.
The structure of the above FCs is similar to that of , so it
A real power unbalance between the sending and receiving will not be discussed further.
end of the dc link causes a respective change in the voltage of
the dc capacitors. , which is the dc voltage regulator, has to V. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM STUDIED
maintain a constant dc voltage across its capacitor by adjusting
the power flow from the dc link to the ac source. In order to The system under study includes a 90-MW offshore WF with
achieve this, the measured dc-link voltage (at the point G, Fig. 3) induction generators, which sends power to a weak ac network
is compared to its reference value and its error is passed through of 20 kV via a VSC-based HVdc link.
an AFCS , which generates the signal (Fig. 8). The The application of the WF supplying a weak network was
value of comes up, according to (4) chosen to test the performance of the system, as it is a case in
which the supplying power makes fluctuations and some times
(4) big (ramp) changes. If the system is able to cope with these
disturbances, it will operate successfully under any other op-
where is the new value of the phase angle , and is erating conditions. Also, the much higher value of inertia of the
the previous value of the phase angle . wind-turbine (WT) rotating parts, compared to the inertia of a
When the dc voltage is too high, is adjusted to push more common machine rotating parts, renders the study of the system
power into the ac system. So the cable and capacitors are dis- very interesting.
charged and the dc voltage is reduced. The WF consists of 50 squirrel-cage induction generators.
As the dc-link voltage is regulated at a constant value, the Each turbine is coupled to the induction generator through a
active power flow between the two VSCs is automatically bal- speedup gear ratio. At a wind speed of 12 m/s, each machine
anced, without the need of a telecommunication line. reaches its rated output of 1800 kW.
992 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 2, APRIL 2006

The modeling of the turbine characteristics was accomplished

through the following equations [6]:

(5)
(6)
(7)

where
wind turbine power;
wind density ;
Fig. 10. Wind velocity.
tip speed ratio;
pitch angle;
blade impact area;
wind velocity;
performance coefficient;
blade semidiameter;
angular velocity of the turbine;
constants.
The wind model used in this application is a three- component
model [7] and is defined by the following equation:
(8)
where is the base wind velocity, is the ramp wind Fig. 11. Power at the sending and the receiving end of the VSC-based HVdc
component, and is the noise wind component. link.
The 20-kV ac network has a short-circuit capacity (SCC)
equal to 45 MVA. The dc cables are coaxial and 100 km long; dc
capacitors of 500 F are used at each converter. AC capacitors
of a total capacity equal to 10 F are placed at the side of the
WF in order to supply a constant amount of the reactive power
that is necessary for the operation of the inductive generators.
A detailed, nonlinear simulation of the system has been used in
order to test the system under steady-state and transient condi-
tions. Each machine of the WF was represented separately in
the simulation in order to take into account the interaction be-
tween the generators of the WF. The basic simulation program
used is PSCAD/EMTDC. Because the control system was based
on fuzzy logic, the fuzzy logic toolbox of MATLAB was also Fig. 12. Electrical frequency and its reference.
used. Through C++ programming, the design of AFCs was ac-
complished, converting the simple fuzzy controllers of the fuzzy
reach its optimal value for the specific wind velocity. Before the
logic toolbox into AFCs, which can be self-tuned online.
system manages to reach the steady-state, which corresponds
to the wind velocity of 8 m/s, the wind speed changes again,
VI. EVALUATION OF THE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
rising up to 11 m/s. Then, the real power at both ends increases,
This paragraph presents the simulated response of the system, causing a respective increment of . Even in this disturbance,
under steady-state and two disturbances, a sudden decrease, and stays close to and increases until it reaches its optimal
a sudden increase of the wind speed. value. When this happens, , and reach a
The system is simulated with a wind velocity which fluctu- new steady-state, which corresponds to the maximum absorp-
ates with a mean value near 9 m/s and at 200 s, following an tion of real power from the WF.
almost step change, drops to a mean value near 8 m/s (Fig. 10). Fig. 13 shows the dc voltage at the receiving end of the link
After a few seconds, the wind velocity rises suddenly up to and its reference . As decreases, the
11 m/s. decreases too. The control system detects the deviation of the dc
Figs. 11–14 show the response of the system at the above voltage from its reference and gives an order to adjust the phase
mentioned disturbances. When the wind velocity decreases, the angle to push less power to the ac system and to increase the dc
values of the real power at the two ends and voltage. Finally, the dc voltage reaches its reference value again.
start to decrease (Fig. 11). Then, the control system gives an Respectively, when the dc voltage rises, the control system gives
order to decrease (Fig. 12). We can observe that is an order to push more power to the ac system, so the dc voltage
continuously attached to . keeps decreasing, trying to returns to its reference value.
KOUTIVA et al.: OPTIMAL INTEGRATION OF AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM TO A WEAK AC GRID 993

VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the connection of a big offshore WF of induc-
tion generators to a long-distance weak ac grid is studied. The
only feasible solution for this connection is an HVdc link based
on VSCs, which offers the possibility to supply the variable real
power of the WF to the low short-circuit capacity bus at the PCC
with an acceptable power quality. This system has a very un-
stable and fluctuating behavior by nature, so it demands a quick,
flexible, and adaptive control. The proposed control system is
based on adaptive fuzzy control. The AFCs that are presented in
this paper have the ability to be self-tuned online in order to have
Fig. 13. DC voltage at the grid. an optimum performance in every operating condition. They can
easily adapt to the quickly changing and fluctuating values of
the wind velocity, so they offer the possibility to achieve, apart
from an optimum integration of the WF to the weak ac grid,
maximum wind power acquisition, driving the WFs to the max-
imum aerodynamic efficiency.

REFERENCES
[1] G. Venkataramanan and B. K. Johnson, “A superconucting dc trans-
mission system based on VSC transmission technologies,” IEEE Trans.
Appl. Superconduct., pt. 2, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1922–1925, Jun. 2003.
[2] W. Lu and B.-T. Ooi, “DC overvoltage control during loss of converter
in multy-terminal voltage-source converter-based HVDC,” IEEE Trans.
Power Del., vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 915–920, Jul. 2003.
[3] B. R. Andersen, L. Xu, and P. J. Horton, “Topologies for VSC transmis-
sion,” Power Eng. J., vol. 16, pp. 142–150, Jun. 2002.
[4] L. Xu, V. G. Agelidis, and E. Acha, “Steady state operation of HVDC
Fig. 14. RMS ac voltage at the grid. power transmission system with voltage-source converters and simulta-
neous VAR compensation,” in Proc. EPE, Graz, Austira, 2001.
[5] X. Koutiva, T. Vrionis, N. A. Vovos, and G. B. Giannakopoulos, “A
simulation model of an HVDC link using VSC’s and a control system
exploiting its capabilities,” in Proc. CSIT, 2002.
[6] S. Heier, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, NY: Wiley, 1998, p. 35.
[7] P. M. Anderson and A. Bose, “Stability simulation of wind turbine
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3791–3795, Dec. 1983.

X. I. Koutiva (S’03) was born in Tripolis, Greece, in

1976. She received the Electrical Engineering degree
from the University of Patras, Rion, Greece, in 2000,
where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree.
She is mainly specializing in HVdc transmis-
sion based on voltage-source converters (VSCs),
Fig. 15. RMS ac voltage at the grid when the controllers are simple FCs. renewable energy sources, power quality, computer
applications in power systems analysis, and intelli-
gent control.
Fig. 14 shows the voltage at the ac grid. We can observe that
the ac voltage stays between the acceptable limits, even during
the disturbances. It starts deviating from its reference for a few
seconds after the wind speed changes, but the control system
quickly detects this deviation and drives the voltage to its initial
level. T. D. Vrionis was born in Athens, Greece, in 1976.
In order to indicate the amelioration of the system perfor- He received the Electrical Engineering degree from
the University of Patras, Rion, Greece, in 2001, where
mance when AFCs are used instead of simple unsupervised FCs, he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree.
Fig. 15 shows the ac voltage at the grid bus when the controllers His main research interests include HVdc trans-
are unsupervised FCs. The FCs offer satisfactory performance mission based on voltage-source converters (VSCs),
renewable energy sources, power quality, computer
in steady-state, but when the wind speed changes suddenly, they applications in power systems analysis, and intelli-
cannot react as fast as they should, resulting in a big deviation gent control.
of the voltage from its reference.
994 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 2, APRIL 2006

Nicholas A. Vovos (M’76–SM’95) was born in Gabriel B. Giannakopoulos (M’95–SM’96) was

Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1951. He received the born in Volos, Greece, in 1950. He received the
M.Sc. degree from the University of Manchester Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the
Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), University of Patras, Rion, Greece, in 1978.
Manchester, U.K., in 1975, and the Ph.D. degree Currently, he is Professor in the Electrical and
from the University of Patras, Rion, Greece, in 1978. Computer Engineering Department, University of
Currently, he is Professor and Head of the Elec- Patras. His main interests are HVdc transmission,
trical and Computer Engineering Department, Uni- computer techniques in power system analysis,
versity of Patras. His research interests are the tran- flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS), power
sient stability study of integrated ac/dc systems, flex- quality, and renewable energy sources.
ible ac transmission systems (FACTS), power quality,
and renewable energy sources.