Phasor measurement units: Functionality and applications

This paper has described a high-level plan to improve power system grid security. The primary intent is to protect the electrical interconnection from a widespread collapse. Wide area controls are meant to protect the grid as an entity. In some cases, the appropriate action would be islanding and blacking out a portion of the grid in order to prevent widespread collapse. New wide area systems will enable rapid diagnosis and provide solutions to specific grid disruptions or outages. A successful intelligent grid control implementation will require careful coordination between wide-area and local control schemes. Since many of the control actions will need to be decided and executed quickly, the tools need to be reliable, prompt and correct. They need to have secure backup schemes to ensure reliability. Secure, reliable communication has been identified as the primary challenge to deploying automated, prompt self-healing wide-area grid control actions. Another implementation challenge remains, the complexity, architecture, location and costs of such type of wide area systems.