SCiBreak Joins PROMOTioN Offshore Grid Project

Swedish company SCiBreak has joined the PROMOTioN consortium, which aims to develop and demonstrate diode rectifier offshore converters, HVDC grid protection system, and HVDC circuit breaker prototypes. PROMOTioN will also deliver a regulatory and financial framework, including an offshore grid deployment plan for the future offshore grid system in Europe.

SCiBreak, a Swedish company founded in 2014 to commercialise new technology for interrupting electric current, will contribute to the objectives of PROMOTioN with its HVDC breaker technology.

The company intends to take part in the efforts towards standardisation in the field of HVDC breakers within the project, together with the other project partners. SCiBreak will also support the work towards creating mathematical models of HVDC breakers on different levels of abstraction, so that their interaction with the overall system can be studied by simulation.

Furthermore, the company will participate in the development of practices and standards for testing of HVDC breakers. In particular, a prototype of their breaker technology will be made available for testing at DNV GL’s facilities. The results from the testing will further add to the modelling and simulation efforts in the project. Finally, SCiBreak will contribute to a techno-economic analysis of HVDC equipment that will serve as one input to the deployment plan for a European offshore HVDC grid that PROMOTioN will provide.

The PROgress on Meshed HVDC Offshore Transmission Networks (PROMOTioN) presently the biggest energy project in the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research Program. The project consortium, coordinated by DNV GL, includes 35 partners from 11 countries – all major HVDC manufacturers, TSOs linked to the North Sea, several wind turbine suppliers, offshore wind developers, leading academics, industry organisations and consulting companies.

The project’s specific objective is to pursue an agreement between network operators and major equipment suppliers regarding a technical architecture and a set of multi-vendor interoperable technologies in order to accelerate HVDC grid development.