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Phasor Measurements Units for Wide Area

Measurements in Smart Grids – A Review
Jayanth Bhargav

Abstract: A power grid must ensure reliability and safety, which necessitates continuous monitoring and control. Due to
slew in time caused by state estimators, the concept of estimation is now being replaced by direct measurements. Phasor
measurement units (PMU’s) are electronic devices that directly measure the voltage magnitudes and phase angles when
connected to a node or bus of a power system. The analysis of the PMU data will directly give the state and information
about the operational stability of the dynamic power system.
Index Terms— Phasor, SCADA, Frequency Deviation, Total Vector Error, Data Concentrators,

II. SYSTEM OPERATIONAL PARADIGM

I. INTRODUCTION1
T HE power industry is now making a transition from the
traditional grids and control methodologies to more efficient
and reliable strategies and technologies for faster and effective
control of dynamic operation of power systems. The need
for more electric power, integration, efficient operation and
management of renewable energy systems and optimal usage
strategies for ageing assets is required. The first step towards
faster decision and control is being implemented by replacing
state estimation by direct measurements. The phasor
measurement units (PMU’s) or Synchrophasors are devices
that measure and transmit the measurements remotely. They
measure voltage magnitudes and phase angles when connected
to a node or bus of a power system. This facilitates wide area
measurements and data acquisition at a much faster rate as
compared to traditional state estimation techniques. The
advantage of PMU’s is that there is very less tine slew except
for the latency in communication. The figure below shows
the block level conceptualization of a Phasor Measurement
Unit.
The requirements of a real time monitoring and control
system for the grid requires the following:
1. Sense the electrical parameters that decide the
stability of the system at required nodes or buses of
the power system
2. Communicate the measurements to a single point to
facilitate complete data acquisition for analysis
3. Compute on the data to analyze the operation of the
system
4. Visualize and simulate the power flow in the system
for the obtained computational results
5. Control the system to stabilize it and make it operate
in the defined range
III. COMPARISON OF SCADA AND PMU
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is a
system, which is being used currently in control of power
system. It contains the indications of the equipment’s and
voltage and load data of the system. However, it has many
shortcomings as compared to PMU’s. The following table
compares the various aspects of PMU’s and SCADA
systems.

Table 1: Comparison of SCADA and PMU attributes

Attribute SCADA PMU

Resolution 1 Sample per 2-4 10-60 samples/s,
min, steady state dynamic
observability observability
Measurement Voltage Voltage
Figure 1: Block Diagram of PMU Magnitude Magnitude and
Phase
Data No Time Stamped
Synchronization and synchronized The decentralization of data access makes it easier to
Area of Control Local Monitoring Wide Area observe the system operation at every level and take
and Control Measurements, appropriate control actions at local levels to avoid the faults
Monitoring and to propagate to other parts of the systems. The internal
Control communication between PDC’s at different levels also
ensures that local control is more effective and islanding of
power systems for safety can be made possible. The time
frames at which the different levels of PDC’s operate is as
IV. PMU INTEGRATION
indicated in Fig.3.
The PMU’s are integrated into the system through
measuring instruments like Current Transformers and The PDC aligns all the information by time from multiple
Potential Transformers. Below is a figure that describes measuring units and transmits the aggregated time
how PMU’s are connected in the grid. synchronized data set as a single data stream. It archives
data and process the information and also exchanges
records with PDCs at other locations of the grid.
Communication systems installed with the PMU’s link
multiple PMUs to a PDC (or PDCs to other PDCs) for real
time data transfer for the purpose of local data analysis and
master data analysis. A secure VPN connection from a
communications center is ensured for data security and
protecting the system from any cyber threats.

The captured phasors are to be time-tagged based on the

time of the UTC time reference. The Time Stamp is an 8-
byte message consisting a 4 byte “Second Of Century
– SOC”, a 3-byte Fraction of Second and a 1-byte Time
Quality indicator. The SOC time-tag counts the number of
seconds that have occurred since inception of PMU, With
Figure 2: PMU connected to grid 3-bytes for the Fraction of Second, one second can be
broken down into 16,777,216 counts or about 59.6 ns/count
V. MEASUREMENTS AND DATA CONCENTRATION and the Time Quality byte contains information about the
status and relative accuracy of the source clock
The data collected by PMU’s are communicated to Phasor
Data Concentrators either by wired or wireless
communication systems. The data acquisition and
transmission occur at various levels. Local data, regional
data and wide area measurement data are available at
different levels of the Phasor Data Concentrators (PDC’s).
The PDC’s communicate with individual PMU’s, with
other PDC’s and also with the Master Data Concentrator.
The figure below describes the topology of PDC’s.

Figure 4: Time-synchronized Measurement of Phasors

Figure 3: Phasor Data Concentrator Network Topology


VI. PERFORMANCE CRITERIA
Accuracy for the Synchrophasor is measured by a value
termed the “Total Vector Error” or TVE. TVE is defined as
the square root of the difference squared between the real
and imaginary parts of the theoretical actual phasor and the
estimated phasor to the ratio of magnitude of the theoretical
phasor and presented as a percentage. PMU that must
maintain less than a 1% TVE under conditions of ±5 Hz of
off-nominal frequency, 10% THD, and 10% out-of-band
influence signal distortion.
Figure 5: PMU Accuracy Estimation
VII. DATA ANALYTICS
The measurements obtained from PMU’s are used to
analyze the system behavior patterns and monitor the
system on real-time basis. The following information of the
power system are made available by PMU’s:
1. Positive sequence voltages and currents
2. Phase voltages and currents
3. Local frequency
4. Local rate of change of frequency
5. Circuit breaker and switch status
The PMU’s continuously compare the phase angles
between two nodes of the system. If the phase difference
between two nodes of the system is found to be changing
with time, then it physically implies that the frequency of
AC is varying. This information will be indicated in the
PDC units immediately so that load shedding can be done.
The data available at the Phasor Data Concentrators can be
used for analytics and system behavioral pattern studies.
The availability of large amounts of data with time
stamping will be an added advantage for novel controller
designs. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN’s) can be built
which can be trained with the data. The ANN’s will be able
to predict, control and analyze the dynamic operation and
faults of the power system precisely.
The global behavior of the grid may be understood and
analyzed from local measurements of the power system.
Phasor measurement data obtained from PDC’s can be used
to supplement and enhance the existing control algorithms
and strategies in the control centers and provide new
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functionalities. Phasor measurement data with GPS signal
can provide synchronized measurements that will give a
real-time tracking of power flow in the system. It is very
beneficial for studying fault propagation and time delays
associated with the faults in various parts of the system.
Measurements of the phases directly facilitate computation
of the power transfer between buses directly. They have
very high sampling rate (approximately 30 samples per
second) and provide the grid operators an extended
visibility beyond their own operating region. This ensures
the grid stability and reliability. Disturbance monitoring
will be possible on real-time basis from transient and steady
state responses.
VIII. CHALLENGES
While PMU’s help in faster data acquisition and wide area
operation and control of power grids, implementation of
PMU’s to make the grids more sensitive to dynamics has its
own challenges. Visualization of PMU data from a large
number of PDC’s becomes difficult as the amount of
measurements increase. Managing large amounts of data
requires memory and robust computation systems. The
Communication of PMU data on real time is expensive due
to complexities involved in communication network to
ensure data security. Optimal Placing of PMU’s is
necessary to ensure minimum investment and maximum
outcome of PMU based Grid control. Transition from
presently available technology to PMU’s calls for high
initial investment. The PDC’s are prone to Cyber Attacks
and cost of securing the PDC data increases the cost of the
overall system.
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