ABSTRACT:

Deregulation, market transactions, congestion management, and the separation of functions have created increasing complexity that is making it difficult to maintain situational awareness and supervision of Power System performance over large areas. Past reliability events (such as blackouts) have highlighted the need for better situational awareness and advanced applications to improve planning, operations, and maintenance. The deployment of a continent- wide wide area measurement system (WAMS) is an important part of the solution to these complex problems, but it faces challenges with respect to Communications and security.