Applications of phasor measurement units and wide-area measurement system in Finland

Wide-area measurement -project was started by Fingrid, the Finnish transmission system owner and operator (TSO), back in 2006. Nowadays the system deploys 12 phasor measurement units (PMU) and a phasor data concentrator (PDC) with applications. PMU measurements are also streamed from and to wide-area measurement systems in Norway and Denmark. From the very beginning, Fingrid's focus of the Wide-area measurement system (WAMS) development has been on power oscillation monitoring, and Fingrid has actively worked for algorithm development. Although the original scope was to use WAMS as a monitoring tool in control center, during the project synchrophasor measurements have been successfully applied for various power system planning and analysis purposes. In addition to the WAMS, this paper presents also number of different applications of synchrophasor measurements in Finland. The practical experiences from different applications are described and the main projected challenges especially related to development of real-time stability monitoring applications suitable for Fingrid's purposes are discussed in detail.