Applications

Of course the real issue is:  what good is all this?  Engineers are fascinated with the measurement, particularly its high speed and accuracy.  Administration and operations staff need to see a defined benefit to justify the cost and maintenance. load for a new system. Several early test systems were implemented for demonstrating real-time control potential, and for recording data for analysis.  These tests demonstrated potential and provided interesting observations of system behavior.  But value did not exceed cost and widespread deployment did not follow.  In these test systems, technical problems gave less than optimal performance which was not an incentive to proceed with deployment.  There is also a reluctance to invest in something new and uncertain when the current solution satisfies existing regulations.  Of course this has to be the case since regulations cannot require equipment that does not exist!
The current system at BPA (and other utilities) was implemented in response to a large blackout.  The motivation was better situational awareness and dynamic analysis.  Most of the value has come from event analysis.  With centralized data access, determining a sequence of events and the likely causes can be done in minutes rather than hours and days.  Deeper analysis such as studying modal response and load effects can also be done for better system understanding system model improvement.  Several applications have been developed for comprehensive analysis, including the PSM utilities (DSI tools) and Power System Outlook (PSO).  The DSI toolbox is a suite of tools that runs in the Matlab environment.  PSO runs in the standard Windows and provides a number of windowed displays.  However, the real-time system is tailored to meet the needs of operations including grid awareness and controls.  The PDC correlates and distributes data in real time in a form that can be widely used.  StreamReader provides a useful method of observing system performance, but does not interface into a standard EMS or have direct event recall.  To present data to operations, we needed an interface to standard systems so they could use their usual systems, or a stand-alone system that would provide the same kinds of functions.