by Philippe Egrot, EDF, France

Abstract - Prospects of natural resources exhaustion and environmental issues, particularly climatic modifications, provide a wide focus for research. Europe which has got few fossil resources in its soil needs to increase energy efficiency of electricity uses and integrate massive renewable generation, more than 20% by 2020.
As a consequence, many "Supergrids" projects appeared during last years, more or less realistic. Most of these studies highlighted several technological barriers:
• How to break a DC current greater than 10kA?
• How to reduce losses due to AC/DC converters and build reliable meshed DC grids?
• How to reduce investment costs for long HVDC links?
• How to improve off-shore behavior for submarine equipment?
All these questions are highly interesting research subjects, especially for power electronics scientists.

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