In this paper, a new open-winding control strategy is proposed for a brushless doubly-fed reluctance generator (BDFRG) used for standalone wind turbine or ship generators. The BDFRG is characterized with two windings on the stator: a power winding and a control winding. The control winding is fed with dual two-level three-phase converters, and a vector control scheme based on space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) is designed. Compared to traditional three-level inverter systems, the dc-link voltage and the voltage rating of power devices in the proposed system are reduced by 50% while still greatly improving the reliability, redundancy and fault tolerance of the proposed system by increasing the switching modes. Its performance is evaluated by simulation in MATLAB/SIMULINK, and an experimental study on a 42-kW prototype machine