Introduction to wide-area control of power systems

A key element in the development of smart power transmission systems over the past decade is the tremendous advancement of the Wide-Area Measurement System (WAMS) technology, also commonly referred to as the Synchrophasor technology. Sophisticated digital recording devices called Phasor Measurement Units or PMUs are currently being installed at different points in the North American grid, especially under the smart grid initiatives of the US Department of Energy, to record and communicate GPS-synchronized, high sampling rate (6-60 samples/sec), dynamic power system data. Significant research efforts have been made on techniques to useWAMS for monitoring and situational awareness of large power networks dispersed across wide geographical areas. In contrast, use of WAMS for automatic feedback control has received less attention from the research community. The objective of this paper is to bridge this gap by formulating wide-area control problems for oscillation damping, voltage control, wide-area protection, and disturbance localization. We present the main research challenges that need to be overcome to realize the benefits of wide area control in power systems. Our discussion begins with a review of the fundamental physical models of different characteristic components of a large transmission-level power grid such as synchronous generators, transmission lines, and loads, followed by a description of how these subsystem-level models can be integrated to form the overall system model. We pose ten distinct control-theoretic problems. The first two problems are on using PMU measurements from selected nodes in the system to identify such system models in different resolutions in real-time, and the remaining on how the identified models can be used for designing output-feedback based damping controllers, for understanding voltage fluctuations at different nodes of the network graph, and for detecting malicious inputs entering the system dynamics via faults or extraneous attacks. We also propose two new control paradigms, namely a scheduling approach for appropriate controller selection based on online estimation of oscillation modes, and distributed phasor-based control using model estimation. We illustrate our ideas via representative examples, many of which are inspired by well-known power transfer paths in the US west coast grid, also referred to as the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC).