Phasor measurement unit data visualizations and their role in improving operation of the electric grid

In the energy industry, as in many other industries, data is growing faster than the tools needed to transform it into meaningful insights, decisions, and action. In the North American electric grid, many new sensors, called phasor measurement units, have been installed to better measure, assess, and provide situational awareness to operators of the electric grid. These devices can record measurements over 60 times more frequently than currents systems, meaning more data is available. With the growth of electric grid data, much more work in the industry has focused on creating tools that can translate the wealth of phasor measurement unit data into improved operator system awareness and which can expedite and improve operator decision making. As such, this thesis documents the efforts of the University of Illinois to create visualizations of phasor measurement unit data for the purpose of improving operator situational awareness in electric grids. Specifically, the University of Illinois team created a large-scale electric grid model; created simulations, like earthquakes and ice storms, to strain the grid model; created a software tool that automates the process of going from simulation data to its analysis; and then created several data visualizations aimed at improving real time operation of the electric grid. Though the work was done for a specific region of the U.S. electric grid, the processes that were followed, the software that was built, and the visualizations that were made can be easily extended to any electric system, and, in fact, making sure they could be generalized was a key guiding principle of our work

Application of Large-Scale Synthetic Power System Models for Energy Economic Studies

Due to information confidentiality issues, there is limited access to actual power system models that represent features of actual power grids for teaching, training, and research purposes. The authors\u27 previous work describes the process of creating synthetic transmission networks, with statistics similar to those of actual power grids. Thus, this paper outlines a systematic methodology to augment the synthetic network base case for energy economic studies. The key step is to determine generator cost models by fuel type and capacity. Based on statistics summarized from the actual grids, two approaches are proposed to assign coefficients to generator cost models. To illustrate the proposed creation procedure, we describe the construction of a synthetic model for Electric Reliability Council of Texas footprint. Simulation results are presented to verify that the created test system is able to represent the behavior of actual power systems

Improving Operator Situation Awareness by Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) Data Visualization

The application of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data in the power industry is currently an area of intense interest. The key driver for PMU technology is to use the precise time sources provided by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to accurately measure the relative voltage and current phase angles at buses across an interconnect at a very high sampling rate. Presenting PMU data to power system operators in a format that is truly useful for them and that affords improved situation awareness (SA) and fast and accurate decision making is a particular challenge to display design. This report describes development of prototype displays of PMU data where the design criteria were derived from characteristics of the data as well as the situation awareness requirements of power system dispatchers. A prototype display that meets all these design criteria is described