The energy transition results in converter-dominated grids all over the world. Especially in off-grids and week grid-connections, the properties of controlled converters are dominating, leading to new challenges in system design, technical quality management of components and grid integration. To put this in practice, already minor faults in planning or control-algorithm development can result in accelerated aging or damage of components and relevant project delays. To enable the required detailed analysis, ever so often various grid-calculation tools and HIL systems are utilized, resulting in a high effort in resources and costs which is additionally a project risk due to the shortage of experienced experts in controlled power-electronic converters in power systems. Furthermore, there is a need for large-scale EMT-grid calculations to minimize the risk of inadequate behaviour within a large off-grid converter grid or of the interaction between the connected park and the weak grid.

Within this contribution, a new approach towards asset-data management adequate for relevant deep technical aspects of controlled power-electronic converters and an automated process approach for generating models for selected commercial tools will be presented and showcased with an off-grid scenario with 8 controlled converters. The setup will include the offline-simulation tools PSCAD, PowerFactory, VIAvento, Netomac as well as an automated FPGA-based HIL setup with microsecond resolution. The potential EMT grid-calculation performance of more than 100 controlled converters will be showcased with the commercial tool VIAvento. Also, other grid-calculation methods like RMS and harmonic calculation will be included. The results of the different commercial grid-calculation tools and simulations methods will be compared based on a selection of typical studies for grid assessment and grid access, respectively. Lessons learned on technical requirements will be included in the final paper – this includes learnings from using the original control in DLL and shared object from working on different operation systems like Windows, Linux and IOS, relevant e.g. in grid planning, project execution and dynamic security assessments. All these technical novelties aim to create a disruptive process in terms of utilized expert resources.

This introduced and showcased process approach allows for more simulation cases with more technical relevant details in the scope of converter applications. Based on this, the analysis quality as well as the resource utilization can be optimized, leading to a minimization of commercial and time-line project risks.