Timing Within the Western Area Power Administration

Abstract : The Western Area Power Administration (Western), U. S. Department of Energy, is a Federal agency which transmits and markets electric energy primarily generated at hydro-electric dams. The transmission system in the western United States was experiencing many hard-to-explain outages in the early 1980s. It became apparent that better post-outage analysis could be performed if the geographically dispersed generation and load centers had their disturbance recording systems on the same time base. The design criteria was selected to be 1 millisecond synchronization to UTC. One millisecond was the (1982) resolution of electric substation sequential events recorders and light beam oscillographs. With a common time base, analysis would answer the questions of what happened first and in what order. Western had primarily used the time services delivered by WWVB, GOES, and power system microwave systems. This paper discusses the system timing work that has occurred within Western to date.