High-voltage direct current transmission used to look like a specialist technology reserved for unusually long lines, subsea links or awkward grid problems. That is changing. In a recent Redefining Energy conversation, Cornelis Plet, CTO of Grid Systems Integration at GE Vernova, described HVDC as something that is moving into the normal transmission planner’s toolbox rather than sitting off to the side as an exotic developer proposal. The clearest sign is physical standardization. Plet says the European market is converging on 2 GW, 525 kV HVDC as a repeatable building block, with common converter configurations and bipolar designs. Other regions are developing their own patterns, including 3 GW projects in the United States and India. Repetition at that scale matters because manufacturers, cable suppliers, transformer factories and project developers can build around a product family instead of treating every project as a fresh engineering exercise. The catch is that the electrical system around those increasingly standard boxes is not standardizing nearly as quickly. As conventional generators retire and more generation connects through power electronics, transmission systems have to do more than move bulk electricity from one place to another. The converters themselves increasingly have to contribute to grid stability. Grid-forming controls are therefore becoming part of requested HVDC functionality, but Plet was careful about the state of the standards. There is not yet one coherent global definition of how those controls should behave. Requirements differ by grid code and region, which means vendors maintain different implementations and utilities still have to work through how those systems interact. That gets harder again when Europe moves from point-to-point links toward multi-terminal and eventually multi-vendor HVDC grids. A converter station from one supplier talking to another supplier’s equipment is not simply a matter of agreeing on voltage and power. Control modes, protection behavior, interfaces and intellectual property all come into it. Plet previously led PROMOTioN, the European research and demonstration program that worked on the technologies needed for meshed offshore HVDC. The follow-on work is increasingly about proving that separately developed systems can operate together without turning every project into an enormous bespoke integration exercise. There is also a planning problem that better converters cannot fix. HVDC is valuable because it can move very large amounts of electricity over long distances, which often means crossing utility territories, states, national borders and regulatory systems. Europe has at least built institutions for multinational grid planning, however imperfectly. North America remains much weaker at inter-regional planning, cost allocation and agreeing on what counts as a system benefit. Plet’s comments are a useful corrective to the idea that the transmission bottleneck is mainly a factory problem. Manufacturing capacity is expanding and some of the pressure on converter and transformer production is beginning to ease. The harder constraints are moving toward system architecture, interoperability, planning and project execution across institutional boundaries. He also pointed to a constraint that gets less attention than cable factories: experienced power engineers. Standard designs can cut engineering hours per project and AI may automate some work, but an inverter-dominated grid still needs people who understand control, protection, high voltage and how the pieces behave together. Plet sees staffing as one of the industry’s biggest practical limits today. The interesting part of the HVDC buildout is no longer whether the hardware works. It does, at very large scale, and the industry is increasingly repeating standard configurations. The unresolved work is around making many such systems work together inside grids whose technical rules and planning institutions were built for a different era. The full conversation goes much further into China’s approach to multi-vendor operation, Europe’s interoperability work, the North American planning gap, grid-forming controls and the engineering workforce. Read the full conversation or listen to the conversation in TFIE Strategy Briefing:https://briefing.tfie.io/p/hvdc-is-becoming-standard-the-grid
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