MPE can produce high level concept designs for your wind farm, PV farm, or storage site, including a number of options for turbine size, PV layout, inverter size and location (string or central type), substation location, cable routing etc.

For a single site (for energy production), or on a country wide basis (for energy production, capacity credit studies, or reserve optimization), MPE can convert wind or solar irradiation data into power & energy values with associated costs.

MPE can provide detailed electrical designs suitable for putting out for tender. This includes:

A well-designed earthing system is important for the safety of both personnel and equipment. MPE can design and evaluate earthing systems to provide a safe and cost-effective installation. Our earthing studies are conducted using state-of-the-art software that is capable of handling small, simple earth grids through to large systems with complex geometries and multi-level soil models. Our services include:

MPE can provide substation layouts at a level suitable for initial concept exploration through to detailed design.

MPE, together with our experienced offshore fabrication partners, can produce a preliminary design of an offshore substation (electrical, topside, jacket) including rating of equipment and budget estimates.
The design produced is suitable for tender specifications. We can also provide construction supervision to ensure equipment is supplied and installed to specification.

Whether the purpose is for grid code compliance, offshore wind farm export cable compensation, voltage stability improvement, system wide reactive power reserve planning, MPE can appropriately size and specify your reactive dynamic and static reactive power equipment in the most economic way possible while ensuring requirements and voltage stability margins are met.

MPE can assess your project to determine if ​harmonic filtering is required. If so, we can design active or static filtering solutions to mitigate harmonic current emission or resonance issues.
We can develop concept designs, or detailed filter design including specification of individual filter components considering tolerance for frequency and voltage variation, to a level of detail suitable for tender.

A good equipment specification is important to ensure that you get the most cost-effective equipment for your application with no ‘surprises’ after it is received.
Our philosophy to achieve this is to provide specifications that are clear and concise, providing enough information and requirements to ensure that equipment is suitable for the application while not placing unnecessary restrictions on the vendors which can increase costs without providing any tangible benefit.

Following specifying the equipment for your site, MPE can then help you to choose the relevant winner of each package

MPE can route and select cables for your application based on technical requirements and cost impact of CAPEX and OPEX of the system. This can range from checking cable ampacity, voltage drop and short-circuit withstand to ensure compliance with applicable codes, through to optimisation of cable sizes based on installed cost, annualised losses for time-varying loads, and calculation of net present value of losses (OPEX) vs. CAPEX.

MPE can act as an owner's engineer, providing independent advice and expertise to ensure the success of your project.
We have a particular specialization in acting as the owner's engineer for renewable energy projects.

Throughout the construction process, MPE can provide on-site support and supervision. Including:

The approach to sizing of storage of any type (battery, flow cell, CAES, pump hydro etc.), depends heavily on the objective of the system to be installed.
Whether it is for system wide reasons (e.g. frequency response, reserve, virtual synchronous machine functionality), or local reasons (e.g. constraint management, variable generation smoothing, voltage support, improvement of synchronous machine transient stability), we can produce the relevant technical and techno-economic studies for cost benefit analysis purposes.

We can provide all required grid and distribution code compliance studies for any international requirement (including ENTSO-E requirements) for synchronous or non-synchronous plant. In fact, MPE has developed many of the international requirements found in Grid Codes and Connection Conditions around the world. Therefore we understand the results the utilities are looking for. If non-compliance becomes apparent, then we can propose design modifications or recommend a course of action to resolve the issue, including supporting discussions with the utility / system operator. Examples of the studies we provide include;

The ER G99 standard was introduced in the UK in 2019 following the adoption of the ENTSO-E RfG code requirements. In addition to the typical G5, P28, P28 type studies, it introduced other technical and power system study requirements for distribution connected plant. MPE has successfully delivered many sets of study documentation for Type B, C and D plant to date – for both GB and NI versions of the G99 standard, for converter based and synchronous generation. These requirements are similar to those already found in the GB Grid Code for transmission connected generation. Depending on the size of the plant the requirements include:

Grid owners may request power quality studies prior to allowing connection of new generation or loads to their network. In the UK, these studies are known by the Engineering Recommendation standards G5/4 (harmonics), G5/5 (new harmonic standard) , P28 (rapid voltage change and flicker) and P29 (voltage unbalance).
MPE has substantial expertise in this area — we have completed numerous power quality studies, for sites that are only a few megawatts through to a 2 GW generating plant connected at 400 kV. Our services include:

Determining the most cost effective, but technically compliant point of connection for a project can save substantial money for the project, and the power system end user.
Grid operators in Germany are obligated to assign the closest suitable point of connection at the correct voltage level, assuming there is no more favourable solution from a macroeconomic perspective. If the project developer is not content with the location, they may select another provided it is of a similar cost. Grid operators are therefore obligated to provide the required data to allow developers to make the assessment.
In Great Britain, the CION (Connection and Infrastructure Options Note) records a similar process between developers (for on and offshore projects), transmission owners, and National Grid (as the system operator).

We can provide recorders for transient and harmonic measurements to provide input to studies, for verification of mitigation measures, or for incident investigation purposes. 

Over time, documentation for installed equipment can be lost, be superseded, or may never have existed. Inadequate documentation can stall upgrade or extension projects, complicates maintenance, and can be a health & safety risk.

MPE's engineers have extensive experience with grid code compliance testing, and verification of models against test results. Additionally we have authored compliance manuals to simplify the process for power station developers.
From a utility perspective we can help develop your compliance testing requirements for all types of generation, storage and interconnector technologies.