Strategic PMU placement for stability enhancement

Abstract

This paper explored a novel method for strategic monitoring of a power system to schematically monitor power system variables that are sensitive to transients. The characteristics of a fully developed transient or power swing increase frequency slip rates, generator pole slips, rotor out-of-step etc. whose effects lead to loss of synchronism of coherent generators in a power system. When these occur, the resulting remedy could be load shedding schemes, generator tripping or controlled islanding. Failure to achieve any of these might lead to geographically extensive blackouts and/or the damage of auxiliary power system equipment.This paper looked at the Wide Area Monitoring (WAM) principle, consisting of collection and preprocessing of field data, using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). A data mining exercise was performed purposing to identify strategic positions for PMU placement using the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm. The logic of CART was therefore also discussed.The proposition of strategic PMU placement as implied by the Decision Tree (DT) model acknowledges that a few PMUs in the power system network are capable of achievingWide Area Protection(WAP)functions.