PMU-based informational support of power system control tasks

Abstract

Up-to-date wide area measurement systems (WAMS) based on phasor measurement units (PMU) appeared at the very end of the 20th century. Under present-day conditions, WAMS serve as the basis for information-measuring systems, which significantly improve power system control and operation. In practice, WAMS are mostly used for power system stability control and transient monitoring and visualization. This paper discusses the new opportunities for power system control quality improvement, resulting from PMU application for power system steady-state parameters' assessment. Firstly, better control is provided by online equivalent circuit parameters' identification using PMU measurement data and taking into account FACTS and other shunt and series compensation equipment. Secondly, the paper addresses the problems of "nodal" identification, which have taken on great importance recently due to the intensive development of small-scaled distributed generation. Based on PMU measurements of nodal voltages and incident transmission lines' electric currents, one can obtain online steady-state load characteristics, which can be used for dispatch control applications. Moreover, PMUs provide superaccelerated power flow calculations, which are of crucial importance for emergency automation, adjusted for prior operation. Such principles of emergency automation consist of the quick determination of control actions, aimed at power system stability maintenance in cases of any programmed faults' occurrence. It is known that such control is carried out by means of power flow calculations based on remote metering data. The proposed application and allocation of PMUs in the power system by means of combinatorial matrix transformation to triangle form give the possibility to perform accelerated node-voltage analysis without equivalent circuit simplification. All the calculations are verified using IEEE test networks. © 2014 WIT Press.