UD-STATCOM, a “shock absorber” for oscillations

Active damping that stabilises the network without expending energy or curtailing generation. This simple idea, with its far-reaching implications, is realised in Ramboll’s Universal Damping STATCOM (UD-STATCOM), patent pending. It can eliminate a primary cause of global power grid instability: too many different power sources added to an ageing energy infrastructure – a growing problem that likely contributed to the Iberian outage of April 2025. By Dr Mojtaba Mohaddes, Senior Technical Manager at Ramboll