Abstract A study is presented on power oscillation damping control (POD) using wide area measurements applied to a single static var compensator (SVC). An equivalent power system model representing key characteristics of the Nordic power system is used. Feedback signals from remote phasor measurment units (PMUs) in Norway and Finland are used to damp the critical inter-area modes through a large SVC unit located in south-east Norway. A comparison between two control design approaches -(i) model based POD (MBPOD) -dependant on accurate system model and (ii) indirect adaptive POD (IAPOD) -which relies only on measurements -is made. For MBPOD an optimization approach is used to obtain the parameters of the controller while the IAPOD is based on online Kalman filter estimation and adaptive pole-shifting control. It is shown that the IAPOD yields almost similar performance as the MBPOD with very little prior information about the system. The performance comparison is verified for several tie-line outages