SynchroPhasor Measurements: System Architecture and Performance Evaluation in Supporting Wide-Area Applications

The infrastructure of phasor measurements have evolved over the last 15 years from isolated measurement units to networked measurement systems with footprints beyond individual utility companies. This phasor measurement network, to a great extent, is a bottom-up self-evolving process except some local systems built by design. Given the number of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in the system is small (currently about 70 in each of the western and eastern interconnections in North America), the current phasor network architecture satisfies today's operational requirements. However, the architecture will become a bottleneck when large number of PMUs are installed (e.g. >1000 similar to 10000). The need for phasor architecture design has yet to be addressed. This paper reviews the current phasor networks and investigates future architectures, as related to the efforts undertaken by the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI). Then it continues to present staged system tests to evaluate the performance of phasor networks, which is a common practice in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system. This is followed by field measurement evaluation and the implication of phasor quality issues on phasor applications.