Wide-area Smart Grid situational awareness communications and concerns

Us. utilities are in the process of deploying approximately one thousand phase monitoring units, with many sites using the latest approach in virtual private network, in anticipation of applications for wide-area situational awareness and, eventually, control. The objective of the combined projects is to improve upon SCADA by including phasor data and demonstrate that better operation can be achieved in a centralized model. This report distills project accomplishments, emerging products and standards, and telecommunications insight to validate the objectives of the phase monitoring system initiatives. In addition, this report identifies areas that potentially can affect performance adversely. The organization of this of this report is to review the topology of phasor monitoring networks, then analyze the terms that contribute to latency within (1) PMUs and their PMU data concentrators, (2) network infrastructure, and (3) hosts and applications. Given that PMUs perform Fast Fourier Transforms and low-pass filters in the field, and given that the VPN technology is MPLS, the time to obtain situational awareness is substantial. While a frequency-domain pervasive view of power systems describe here may be no less stale than SCADA systems, the insight and potential are attractive. Previous related work by the author focused on Demand Response (DR) load-shedding communications using the SIP protocol as well as a general model for smart grid communications latency.