Since the development of the technology and the commissioning of the first pioneering commercial projects in the 1950s, Europe has witnessed a large increase of HVDC installations. Especially during the last decade, the number of HVDC projects has rocketed. This is mainly due to the need of interconnecting countries via submarine links to transport large amounts of energy and the development of the Voltage Source Converter (VSC) technology, which has allowed the development of large offshore wind farms located far from shore.
Although most of the HVDC installations currently in operation are point-to-point links, the experience that TSOs, developers, manufacturers and other stakeholders have gathered during these years can be of great value when it comes to designing and implementing future meshed HVDC grids in Europe.

Deliverable 1.2 (D1.2) is one of the outputs of PROMOTioN Work Package 1 (WP1), which is a horizontal WP that covers the whole project and has the general objective of defining the requirements that should be met by an offshore HVDC grids and the wind farms connected to it. These requirements will be applied to all the WPs in the Project. D1.2 captures the results of Task 1.3: Assessment and inputs from existing offshore connections and grids. The main objective of this task is to engage with stakeholders involved in the existing European HVDC installations (TSOs, offshore wind farm developers, manufacturers, consultants, universities, research institutes and others) to gather best practices and lessons learned during the different phases of these projects.