Wide area power system visualization using real-time synchrophasor measurements

It is critically important for improving the wide area situation awareness of the operators or operational engineers and regional reliability coordinators of a large interconnected systems to prevent large scale cascading system outages. This paper describes an advanced wide-area power system visualization application (WAPSVA) for the real-time reliability monitoring using real-time synchrophasor measurements and for the post event analysis using historical synchrophasor measurements related to the large system events. This paper also presents a very useful feature which will allow a large number of users to perform the near real-time event replay a few seconds after a new large event occurs in a large interconnected power system. This wide area power system visualization application can also show the location, magnitude and the related event message on the visualization display in real-time by integration with the on-line event triggering and location of disturbance applications. The main performance challenges of the visualization application include how to efficiently handle large volume of synchrophasor measurements and how to support large number of concurrent users for performing real-time reliability monitoring, near real-time event replay or post event analysis. This paper describes the technologies used in the WAPSVA application to meet the challenging performance requirements. The technologies include the memory residence object oriented database, event oriented database and Smart Client. The system architecture, the technical approaches and the solution algorithms used in this visualization application are described in detail. This visualization application has been integrated and tested using the simulated synchrophasor measurements and the real time synchrophasor measurements of Eastern Interconnections at the TVA Super Phasor Data Concentrator (SPDC). The performance of the initial testing is very encouraging and the test results are presented in this paper.