Power System Monitoring

Power system monitoring is the most fundamental function of a system operator. Operators need to examine the prevailing system condition to establish whether the system is operating within acceptable thresholds. The decision system required for power system monitoring includes the infrastructure to measure signals such as voltages and reactive and active power flows, status of switches, and transferring them to the control center. The infrastructure used for measuring and transporting the information to the control is called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system while the decision support tool that filters and recreates the missing information is called ?>State Estimation.?> SCADA performs the two main functions of data acquisition and supervisory control. Recently, there have been methods developed that not only identify if a system is observable or not, they can identify how much a single measurement observes different state variables and basically comes up with quantitative observability.