Real-Time Event Detection Based on Weibull Distribution Using Synchrophasor Measurements for Enhanced Situational Awareness

The proliferation of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) to monitor power grid dynamics at a high resolution (10–100 samples/sec) has opened a new paradigm to situational awareness. Existing event detection techniques for identifying multiple events like transmission line faults, generation trip, line trip, load loss, current transformer (CT) failure, islanding, etc., are prone to misdetection, delayed detection, and false detection. Moreover, most of them can detect events either with fast (transient events) or slow dynamics (oscillatory and excursion events) using synchrophasor measurements. This paper focuses on detecting events with both fast and slow dynamics using wide-area frequency measurements. To this end, a novel method is proposed based on Weibull distribution, which we call as Weibull-based Excursion Transient and Oscillatory (WETO) method. The WETO method can identify the time of inception, location, and severity of the event in near real-time using only a single parameter, known as variability. The events are detected within a time window of 5 cycles using only frequency measurements. The proposed method is validated for the Indian as well as the North American grid disturbances, and the results show that it would be beneficial to the system operator in visualizing the true situation of the grid events.