Design Aspects for Wide-Area Monitoring and Control Systems

This paper discusses the basic design and special applications of wide-area monitoring and control systems, which complement classical protection systems and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition/Energy Management System applications. Systemwide installed phasor measurement units send their measured data to a central computer, where snapshots of the dynamic system behavior are made available online. This new quality of system information opens up a wide range of new applications to assess and actively maintain system's stability in case of voltage, angle or frequency instability, thermal overload, and oscillations. Recent developed algorithms and their design for these application areas are introduced. With practical examples, the benefits in terms of system security are shown.