Mitigating the impact of false data in wide area control of power systems

The potential of wide area control (WAC) to improve power system stability encourages utility incorporating phasor measurement units (PMUs) at different nodes. Higher usage of PMU makes the power network more vulnerable to cyber attack (CA) which is a concern for the system operator. Mitigation of the CA is important for any WAC operation. In this paper, a false data mitigation (FDM) strategy is proposed for WAC to maintain stability of the power system even during CA. The proposed FDM filters out the data received from the attacked PMUs, if any, and accordingly modifies the WAC model in the phasor data concentrator. The WAC continues its operation with the modification and using the data from the unattacked PMUs. The proposed FDM technique is tested in the New England 39 bus system and compared with the available dynamic state estimation (DSE) method. •A strategy is proposed to mitigate the impact of false data in wide area control (WAC).•The proposed method modifies the state space model of WAC.•To mitigate the impact of attack in WAC, the proposed models avoid estimation methods.