Frontiers of synchrophasor solutions deployment

The utility industry at large has made significant investments in deployment of production grade Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) and synchrophasor technology in recent years, with now well over 4,000 Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) globally. Some of early real-time PMU applications and visualization being deployed at utility and ISO control rooms include angular separation, oscillatory stability monitoring, islanding, disturbance detection and or voltage stability monitoring applications. While the industry-at-large, foresees the promise that synchrophasors and WAMS hold in modernizing the power grid, and shaping the generation Energy Management Systems, there are some common take-always from these early WAMS installations. This paper summarizes ongoing efforts at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) including a state-of-art Proof of Concept (POC) facility that has been engineered for validating and maturing innovative applications such as PMU-based Real-Time Voltage Instability Indicator (RVII) and Linear State Estimation (LSE) before the applications can be rolled out into the control room. Some of the applications that have been introduced through the POC facility at PG&E are all now available for System Planners, Operational Engineering, and real-time operation use. The paper also describes some of the advances made in overcoming hurdles that had been identified and roadmap to addressing them.