Subsea power transmission and distribution is an emerging technology that may enable the oil and gas industry to produce hydrocarbon reserves in deeper and more remote offshore waters. The longer tieback subsea operations will likely require pumps and compressors driven by electric motors to be located on the sea floor to pressure boost the oil and gas to surface and/or onshore platforms. Existing HVAC and HVDC technologies are efficient means for subsea power transmission and distribution. However, they are subject to a variety of limitations, for instance, the single-point failures that would impact production uptime. Furthermore, it is challenging to implement subsea bulk power transmission and distribution by using existing architectures due to the footprint, weight and electrical insulation requirements. This paper describes a subsea power distribution architecture - AC ring. It can be used to interface a high-voltage bulk power transmission network, either AC or DC, to a subsea multi-load AC system.
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