Power System Observability and Fault Detection Using Phasor Measurement Units (PMU)

The increasing demand of load without considerable increase in transmission resources has posed numerous constraints and challenges in the power system monitoring and performance. The issues of deregulation trend in the industry and the requirement of better network monitoring, leads to the development of the solutions for wide area monitoring (WAM), protection and control, than the currently used methods which are mostly good for local area monitoring, protection and control. The purpose is to increase the overall system efficiency and reliability for all power stages via significant dependence on WAM as distributed intelligence agents with improved monitoring, protection, and control capabilities of power networks. The necessity for WAM has gained worldwide acceptance, and a number of WAM systems have been established, or initialized, in different power utilities throughout the world. Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) is enabler of time-synchronized measurement, it communicate the synchronized local information to remote station. Wide-area monitoring, protection, and control require communicating the specific-node information to a remote station but all information should be time synchronized so that to neutralize the time difference between information. It gives a complete simultaneous snap shot of the power system.