PMU Based Frequency Regulation Paradigm for Multi-Area Power Systems Reliability Improvement

This work proposes a novel frequency regulation paradigm for multi-area interconnected power systems. The developed approach capitalizes on phasor measurement units (PMUs) advanced monitoring to overcome design limitations imposed by legacy supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. For this, a novel measurement-based controller integrating primary and secondary regulation is proposed. First, taking advantage of PMUs synchronized measurements, novel centralized corrective actions are developed using dynamic data aggregation. These actions provide a foreknowledge of generators expected steady-state during the system dynamics, significantly improving the system frequency rebound and steady-state realization while ensuring null area control errors (ACE). Next, a new local power system stabilizing perspective is developed. This controller provides local counterweighting actions allowing for faster corrective actions without compromising the system dynamic response, i.e., mitigating oscillations and overshoots. The proposed approach design considers monitoring and communication system non-idealities, such as: latency, processing and waiting time, measurements synchronization and sampling resolution. In addition, stability and steady-state objectives are mathematically demonstrated, and comparative simulation case-studies developed. Obtained results indicate a meaningful improvement of power systems frequency regulation and reliability, including faster steady-state realization and rebound, mitigation of oscillations and overshoot, improved service capacity and higher reliability to cascade events.