Information extraction from PQ disturbances — An emerging direction of power quality research

Power quality is a field that deals with all sorts of power disturbances. Past power quality research and development activities have been focused on the harmful aspects of the disturbances. With the wide spread use of power quality monitoring tools, more and more users and developers start to realize that power disturbances can carry valuable information about the conditions of a system and its equipment. As a result, initiatives that explore the “useful” aspects of power disturbances have emerged. For example, short-circuit caused voltage sag disturbances have been exploited for fault location purposes, characteristics of capacitor-switching transients are used to determine and locate which feeder capacitors are operating normally. Such information-oriented use of power disturbance data and monitoring techniques could emerge as an important field of the future smart grid. The objective of this paper is to present some of the example developments in this interesting field. We hope this survey/review paper will help to stir up broader research interests in the field and serves as a step stone for PQ disturbance researchers.