Real Time Congestion Monitoring and Management of Power Systems

The collapse of the US electric grid on August 14, 2003 caused the largest blackout in US history, knocking more than 100 power plants offline and leaving 50 million customers in the US and Canada without power. The old transmission systems that were built in the 60’ s or 70’ s are blamed for this outage. Certainly, it is time to upgrade and modernize the transmission system. But it is more important to predict and avoid ahead of real time the risks to the existing grid, or help the analysis of the real time situation in order to minimize the damage or provide the useful information for how to upgrade the grid. This paper proposes an approach of power systems real time congestion monitoring and management (RTCMM) to reach this goal. The proposed RTCMM system will be a collection of analysis, processes, computing equipment, measurement devices and communications that are assembled to provide the means to maintain a secure system state. The implementations of real time congestion monitoring and management are discussed in the paper.