PMU-Based Wide-Area Security Assessment: Concept, Method, and Implementation

This paper presents a concept, method, and implementation of utilizing phasor measurement unit (PMU) information to monitor the wide-area security of a power system. The close dependency of major transmission paths requires an approach that takes that interaction into account while establishing operational transfer capability, and evaluates grid reliability and security on a system-wide basis. Thus, the concept of wide-area security region, which considers all essential constraints, including thermal, voltage stability, transient stability, and small signal stability, is proposed. This approach expands the idea of traditional transmission system nomograms to a multidimensional case, involving multiple system limits and parameters such as transmission path constraints, zonal generation or load, etc., considered concurrently. In this paper, the security region boundary is represented using piecewise approximation with the help of linear inequalities (so called hyperplanes) in a multidimensional space, consisting of system parameters that are critical for security analysis. The goal of this approximation is to find a minimum set of hyperplanes that describe the boundary with a given accuracy. Offline computer simulations are conducted to build the security region and the hyperplanes can be applied in real time with phasor information for on-line security assessment. Numerical simulations have been performed for the full size Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system model, which comprises 15 126 buses and 3034 generators. Simulation results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach, and proved that the proposed approach can significantly enhance the wide-area situation awareness for a bulk power system like WECC.