HVDC-VSC System

In January 2010, he joined the French TSO RTE (Réseau de Transport d’Electricité) where he is currently involved in power system simulation and HVDC projects as a technical expert. One of his main tasks is to integrate HVDC/FACTS equipment to the French grid. He oversees the technical coordination of studies performed for HVDC integration in France and abroad. He was responsible for the development of detailed HVDC and wind turbines models in Uruguay and in the development of specifications for coordination of the 2 HVDC systems in Norway for the project “Equinor Johan Sverdrup VSC multivendor interoperability”.

From 2004 to 2008 he worked at the research center of EDF in the field of insulation coordination and power system simulations. From 2002 to 2004 he worked at IREQ (Hydro-Québec) on research and development activities related to the simulation and analysis of electromagnetic transients.

Sébastien Dennetière graduated from the École Supérieure d’Electricité (Supélec) France in 2002. He received his M.Sc. degree and PhD degree from the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 2003 and 2017, respectively.

He is a Power System Expert Engineer in RTE international since 2018, working mainly for the EQUINOR Johan Sverdrup project. In this position, he is involved in the coordination control philosophy of the two HVDCs links of the project. He follows replica installation and commissioning. In addition, he performs and analyses parallel tests with control replicas.

At the same time, he is the secretary of CIGRE WG B4.70: “Guide for Electromagnetic Transient Studies involving VSC converters” and member of CIGRE B4-58: “Control Methodologies For Direct Voltage And Power Flow In A Meshed HVDC Grid”. Furthermore, he is the French representant in the committees TC8 / TC22 / TC115, where he follows and reviews new standards related to VSC-HVDC. Similarly, he is a member of TC115 – WG15 – Functional Specifications for HVDC Grid Systems.

Pierre Rault has been studying and dealing with with HVDC topics since his PhD on Multiterminal VSC-HVDC grid control strategies. Beforehand, he worked at GIE IDEA (EDF/Schneider Electric/G2Lab) on wind farm connection. He was in charge of the necessary requirements and thus reviewed grid codes compliance criteria. Moreover, he developed a methodology for wind farm reactive power management.   

Pierre Rault has good proficiency in English. He holds a PhD from Ecole Centrale de Lille, France and a Master’s degree from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France.

Thanks to his extensive experience on HVDC matters, he is member of several Cigré working groups on HVDC, such as “Application guide for the insulation coordination of Voltage Source Converter HVDC (VSC HVDC) stations” and “AC Fault response options for VSC HVDC Converters”. He has contributed and published several articles on power electronics and power delivery, notably in the Wiley IEEE book. He gave conference related HVDC field and EMT-type tool and is a regular reviewer for IEEE Transactions of Power Delivery, Industrial Electronics.

Janek Liger is an engineer in the Power Electronics Department of RTE currently working on the construction of the VSC HVDC France to Ireland Celtic Interconnector. In the last 5 years , he supported VSC interconnector projects in early stage of development (with a focus on tender specification, terms and conditions, and evaluation). He previously worked on cross-border capacity calculation and congestion management for Western European TSOs at Coreso. He graduated from the engineering school École Centrale Paris (CentraleSupelec) in 2012 and has a double degree (MSc) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia).

He is now the Asset Manager for RTE HVDC links at the National Center for Grid Expertise. He also works on the Operation & Maintenance of the INELFE link (2x1GW VSC-MMC, Siemens) and IFA2 link (1GW VSC-CTL, ABB). Finally, he is involved in the Technical Specification of future HVDC projects such as Biscay Bay and CELTIC.