New grid-forming control boosts frequency support from offshore wind farms

A team led by Zhenghua Xu (DTU) and including Dominic Groß, George Alin Raducu, Behnam Nouri, Oscar Saborío-Romano, and Nicolaos A. Cutululis has published a paper on arXiv (2605.23041) proposing an improved holistic grid-forming (GFM) control for HVDC-connected offshore wind power plants (OWPPs). As power electronics increasingly dominate grids, frequency stability becomes critical—OWPPs are expected to provide inertial response and frequency containment reserve (FCR). The innovation lies in coordinating GFM controls at every AC and DC terminal of the HVDC-OWPP system without requiring any communication link between converters. This “holistic” approach is a significant departure from existing decentralized or communication-dependent schemes.

The team first developed a detailed model of a typical HVDC-OWPP system for control design, then formulated the proposed controllers with an analytical tuning method that identifies the upper bound of bandwidth at each terminal. Simulations verified the approach against representative control configurations. Results show the holistic GFM control achieves faster frequency response and more effective frequency support while minimizing the use of each converter’s inherent energy storage. This supports a new design philosophy for converter control in converter-dominated systems—enabling more resilient, cost-effective grid integration of offshore wind.