Experiences with and perspectives of the system for wide area monitoring of power systems

With the emphasis on higher utilization of power systems, monitoring of its dynamics is becoming increasingly important. This requires information with higher accuracy and update rates faster than those usually provided by traditional SCADA systems. In addition, it must be synchronized over a wider geographical area than that provided by traditional protection systems. The introduction of phasor measurement units as well as advances in communication and computational equipment have made it technically feasible to monitor the stability of the power system on-line, using a wide area perspective. This paper outlines the specialized applications to monitor and control voltage as well as frequency stability of power systems and describes their state-of-the-art platform, the wide-area measurement system, which is now commercially available.