Line Outage Detection and Localization via Synchrophasor Measurement

Since transmission lines are crucial links in the power system, one line outage event may bring about interruption or even cascading failure of the power system. If a quick and accurate line outage detection and localization can be achieved, the system operator can take necessary actions in time to mitigate the negative impact. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to study a method for line outage detection and localization via synchrophasor measurements. The density of deployed phasor measurement units (PMUs) is increasing recently, which greatly improves the visibility of the power grid. Taking advantage of the high-resolution synchrophasor data, the proposed method utilizes frequency measurement for line outage detection and power change for localization. The procedure of the proposed method is given. Compared with conventional methods, it does not require the pre-knowledge on the system. Simulation study validates the effectiveness of the proposed method

Micro-Synchrophasors for Power Distribution Monitoring, a Technology Review

The smart grid revolution is creating a paradigm shift in distribution networks that is marked by new, significant intermittencies and uncertainties in power supply and demand. These developments include the dramatic increase in the adoption of distributed energy resources (DER), electric vehicles, energy storage, and controllable loads. This transformation imposes new challenges on existing distribution infrastructure and system operations for stockholders, engineers, operators and customers. Unfortunately, distribution networks historically lag behind transmission networks in terms of observability, measurement accuracy, and data granularity. The changes in the operation of the electric grid dramatically increase the need for tools to monitor and manage distribution networks in a fast, reliable and accurate fashion. This paper describes the development process of a network of high-precision micro phasor measurement units or uPMUs, beginning with an overview of the uPMU technology that provides synchronous measurements of voltage phase angles, or synchrophasors. Next, the uPMU network and communications infrastructure are discussed, followed by an analysis of potential diagnostic and control applications of uPMU data in the electric grid at the distribution level.Comment: 18 page

Fast Distribution Grid Line Outage Identification with μ\muPMU

The growing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in urban distribution grids raises various reliability issues due to DER's uncertain and complex behaviors. With a large-scale DER penetration, traditional outage detection methods, which rely on customers making phone calls and smart meters' "last gasp" signals, will have limited performance, because the renewable generators can supply powers after line outages and many urban grids are mesh so line outages do not affect power supply. To address these drawbacks, we propose a data-driven outage monitoring approach based on the stochastic time series analysis from micro phasor measurement unit ($\mu$PMU). Specifically, we prove via power flow analysis that the dependency of time-series voltage measurements exhibits significant statistical changes after line outages. This makes the theory on optimal change-point detection suitable to identify line outages via $\mu$PMUs with fast and accurate sampling. However, existing change point detection methods require post-outage voltage distribution unknown in distribution systems. Therefore, we design a maximum likelihood-based method to directly learn the distribution parameters from $\mu$PMU data. We prove that the estimated parameters-based detection still achieves the optimal performance, making it extremely useful for distribution grid outage identifications. Simulation results show highly accurate outage identification in eight distribution grids with 14 configurations with and without DERs using $\mu$PMU data.Comment: 9 page

VADER: Visualization and Analytics for Distributed Energy Resources

Enabling deep penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) requires comprehensive monitoring and control of the distribution network. Increasing observability beyond the substation and extending it to the edge of the grid is required to achieve this goal. The growing availability of data from measurements from inverters, smart meters, EV chargers, smart thermostats and other devices provides an opportunity to address this problem. Integration of these new data poses many challenges since not all devices are connected to the traditional supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks and can be novel types of information, collected at various sampling rates and with potentially missing values. Visualization and analytics for distributed energy resources (VADER) system and workflow is introduced as an approach and platform to fuse these different streams of data from utilities and third parties to enable comprehensive situational awareness, including scenario analysis and system state estimation. The system leverages modern large scale computing platforms, machine learning and data analytics and can be used alongside traditional advanced distribution management system (ADMS) systems to provide improved insights for distribution system management in the presence of DERs

Low-Resolution Fault Localization Using Phasor Measurement Units with Community Detection

A significant portion of the literature on fault localization assumes (more or less explicitly) that there are sufficient reliable measurements to guarantee that the system is observable. While several heuristics exist to break the observability barrier, they mostly rely on recognizing spatio-temporal patterns, without giving insights on how the performance are tied with the system features and the sensor deployment. In this paper, we try to fill this gap and investigate the limitations and performance limits of fault localization using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), in the low measurements regime, i.e., when the system is unobservable with the measurements available. Our main contribution is to show how one can leverage the scarce measurements to localize different type of distribution line faults (three-phase, single-phase to ground,..) at the level of sub-graph, rather than with the resolution of a line. We show that the resolution we obtain is strongly tied with the graph clustering notion in network science

Low-Resolution Fault Localization Using Phasor Measurement Units with Community Detection

A significant portion of the literature on fault localization assumes (more or less explicitly) that there are sufficient reliable measurements to guarantee that the system is observable. While several heuristics exist to break the observability barrier, they mostly rely on recognizing spatio-temporal patterns, without giving insights on how the performance are tied with the system features and the sensor deployment. In this paper, we try to fill this gap and investigate the limitations and performance limits of fault localization using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), in the low measurements regime, i.e., when the system is unobservable with the measurements available. Our main contribution is to show how one can leverage the scarce measurements to localize different type of distribution line faults (three-phase, single-phase to ground, ...) at the level of sub-graph, rather than with the resolution of a line. We show that the resolution we obtain is strongly tied with the graph clustering notion in network science.Comment: Accepted in IEEE SmartGridComm 2018 Conferenc

Cost-Effective Bad Synchrophasor Data Detection Based on Unsupervised Time Series Data Analytics

In modern smart grids deployed with various advanced sensors, e.g., phasor measurement units (PMUs), bad (anomalous) measurements are always inevitable in practice. Considering the imperative need for filtering out potential bad data, this paper develops a novel online bad PMU data detection (BPDD) approach for regional phasor data concentrators (PDCs) by sufficiently exploring spatial-temporal correlations. With no need for costly data labeling or iterative learning, it performs model-free, label-free, and non-iterative BPDD in power grids from a new data-driven perspective of spatial-temporal nearest neighbor (STNN) discovery. Specifically, spatial-temporally correlated regional measurements acquired by PMUs are first gathered as a spatial-temporal time series (TS) profile. Afterwards, TS subsequences contaminated with bad PMU data are identified by characterizing anomalous STNNs. To make the whole approach competent in processing online streaming PMU data, an efficient strategy for accelerating STNN discovery is carefully designed. Different from existing data-driven BPDD solutions requiring either costly offline dataset preparation/training or computationally intensive online optimization, it can be implemented in a highly cost-effective way, thereby being more applicable and scalable in practical contexts. Numerical test results on the Nordic test system and the realistic China Southern Power Grid demonstrate the reliability, efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach in practical online monitoring

Real-time Faulted Line Localization and PMU Placement in Power Systems through Convolutional Neural Networks

Diverse fault types, fast re-closures, and complicated transient states after a fault event make real-time fault location in power grids challenging. Existing localization techniques in this area rely on simplistic assumptions, such as static loads, or require much higher sampling rates or total measurement availability. This paper proposes a faulted line localization method based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier using bus voltages. Unlike prior data-driven methods, the proposed classifier is based on features with physical interpretations that improve the robustness of the location performance. The accuracy of our CNN based localization tool is demonstrably superior to other machine learning classifiers in the literature. To further improve the location performance, a joint phasor measurement units (PMU) placement strategy is proposed and validated against other methods. A significant aspect of our methodology is that under very low observability (7% of buses), the algorithm is still able to localize the faulted line to a small neighborhood with high probability. The performance of our scheme is validated through simulations of faults of various types in the IEEE 39-bus and 68-bus power systems under varying uncertain conditions, system observability, and measurement quality.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Online Measurement-Based Estimation of Dynamic System State Matrix in Ambient Conditions

In this paper, a purely measurement-based method is proposed to estimate the dynamic system state matrix by applying the regression theorem of the multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. The proposed method employs a recursive algorithm to minimize the required computational effort, making it applicable to the real-time environment. One main advantage of the proposed method is model independence, i.e., it is independent of the network model and the dynamic model of generators. Among various applications of the estimated matrix, detecting and locating unexpected network topology change is illustrated in details. Simulation studies have shown that the proposed measurement-based method can provide an accurate and efficient estimation of the dynamic system state matrix under the occurrence of unexpected topology change. Besides, various implementation conditions are tested to show that the proposed method can provide accurate approximation despite measurement noise, missing PMUs, and the implementation of higher-order generator models with control devices.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure

A Survey of Data Fusion in Smart City Applications

The advancement of various research sectors such as Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Mining, Big Data, and Communication Technology has shed some light in transforming an urban city integrating the aforementioned techniques to a commonly known term - Smart City. With the emergence of smart city, plethora of data sources have been made available for wide variety of applications. The common technique for handling multiple data sources is data fusion, where it improves data output quality or extracts knowledge from the raw data. In order to cater evergrowing highly complicated applications, studies in smart city have to utilize data from various sources and evaluate their performance based on multiple aspects. To this end, we introduce a multi-perspectives classification of the data fusion to evaluate the smart city applications. Moreover, we applied the proposed multi-perspectives classification to evaluate selected applications in each domain of the smart city. We conclude the paper by discussing potential future direction and challenges of data fusion integration.Comment: Accepted and To be published in Elsevier Information Fusio