Nelson River Bipole

Course of the Nelson River Bipole 1 and 2

Nelson River Bipol 1 and 2 power lines ending at Dorsey Converter Station 16 miles from Winnipeg .

With Nelson River Bipole a system of two Canadian is high voltage DC transmission ¯ lines (HVDC) designated by the the north of Manitoba lying converter stations Gillam (Radisson Converter Station) and Sundance (Henday Converter Station) nearby in the hydropower plants generated electrical energy to the at Winnipeg situated converter station Rosser transmitted (Dorsey Converter station). Bipolar power lines are used on two parallel line routes, which are mostly suspended from overhead line masts.

Bipol 1

A 150 kV mercury vapor rectifier in Bipol 1 from Manitoba Hydros Radisson converter station, August 2003.
At the end of 2004, all of these mercury vapor rectifiers were replaced by thyristors .

The Bipol 1 runs from Gillam (Radisson Converter Station) to Rosser (Dorsey Converter Station). It has a length of 895 km and can transmit a power of 1.62  GW with a bipolar voltage of ± 450  kV . Mercury vapor rectifiers were originally used as converters and were gradually put into operation between March 1971 and October 1977. In the early days, the line worked with lower voltage and lower power. In the 1990s, said mercury vapor rectifiers at one pole of this line, which were the largest mercury vapor rectifiers in the world with a blocking voltage of 150 kV and a maximum current of 1800 A, were replaced by thyristors .

Bipol 2

The Bipol 2 runs from Sundance (Henday Converter Station) to Rosser (Dorsey Converter Station). It is equipped with thyristors. The length of the line of the Bipol2 is 937 km. The Bipol 2 can transmit a power of 1.8 GW with a bipolar voltage of ± 500 kV.

The Nelson River Bipol 2 was commissioned in two stages. In the first expansion stage in 1978, the transmission capacity was 900 MW at a voltage of 250 kV. The system has only been operational at full capacity since 1985.

Unlike Bipol 1, Bipol 2 has always been equipped with thyristors. The thyristor rectifiers come from the German HVDC consortium ( Siemens , AEG and Brown, Boveri & Cie. ) And used water cooling for the first time in a high-voltage DC project. Until then, the relatively few high-voltage direct current systems with thyristors were either equipped with air cooling or, as at the Cahora Bassa dam , which was equipped by the same consortium, with oil cooling .

The thyristor valves were designed in floor-mounted vertical stacks of four rectifiers ("quadrivalves"). Each rectifier contains 96 thyristor levels in series , with two in parallel . They were connected in series with 8 reactor modules in 16 thyristor modules.

Bipol 2 thyristor rectifier: Six pairs of thyristors connected in parallel in one module, with cooling lines and voltage stabilizing capacitors.

A 1,800 A 250 kV quadruple thyristor rectifier at the Manitoba Hydro Henday Converter Station in Bipol 2

Web links

Commons : Nelson River DC Transmission System  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Nelson River DC Transmission System, Manitoba Hydro. Retrieved October 21, 2016 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ C. Beriger, P. Etter, J. Hengsberger, G. Thiele: Design of Water Cooled Thyristor Valve Groups for Extension of Manitoba Hydro HVDC System . ( Memento of the original from November 17, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) CIGRÉ Conference, Paris 1976, paper reference 14-05.