Wide area voltage monitoring, state estimation and control of power systems with embedded facts devices using PMU measurements

The increase in the demand and consumption of electrical energy has put pressure on the modern deregulated power generation, transmission and distribution systems to operate at their capacity limit; making them vulnerable to outages. Local and wide area measurement, voltage monitoring and control of the power grid are increasingly becoming essential to enable early detection of potential operational problems in the system to take appropriate measures.;System wide voltage stability monitoring and control is important in today's deregulated power system. The development of Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) will address the problem of data sharing and accuracy of the state estimation as utility companies are reluctant to share information.;This thesis presents a new computationally less intensive and improved Wide Area Static State Estimation (WASSE) of power systems with embedded Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices using PMU measurements.;A practical real time application of the first level of WASSE and campus grid voltage monitoring using smart meters and the Local Area Network (LAN) of Tennessee Technological University Campus is also presented and discussed.;The PMU measurements improve accuracy of WASSE with minimal data sharing and maintain the independence of the various areas or utility owners. In addition to estimating the state variables, this formulation also estimates the control settings of the FACTS devices for a specified static operating condition. This approach is compared to the traditional wide area state estimation which requires the sharing of boundary and external bus information, boundary bus power flow measurements and the re-estimation of the boundary and external buses. The traditional WASE is computationally intensive and its coordination is more prone to errors.;Voltage control and stability analysis studies are also performed in this thesis to demonstrate the robustness and reliability of proposed approach to load changes in the power system. Simulation results show that the proposed approach not only improves the accuracy of the state estimation, it also reduces the communication bandwidth by eliminating the need for vital internal data sharing between utilities.