TCR VERSUS VSC FOR RAILWAY LOAD BALANCING AND COMPENSATION. A CASE STUDY.

Industrialized countries are facing a fast de- velopment of high-speed trains. These railway loads, along with arc furnaces, constitute the most important individ- ual sources of imbalance and distortion in transmission systems. Several generations of solid-state electronic de- vices can be used to minimize the harmful effects of these singular loads. In this paper, two types of compensators, namely the Thyristor Controlled Reactor (TCR) and the Voltage Source Converter (VSC) are compared in terms of load balancing and reactive power compensation. The PSCAD/EMTDC tool is used to simulate the effect of these devices on a particular substation of the Madrid-Sevilla high-speed route.