California Project Marks a New Era in Smart Grid Monitoring & Management

Press Contacts

Visit our media section and follow the link "Press contacts"

Monitoring & Managing the Grid Like Never Before…

Imagine sitting in a room. You are told to manage a complex network of lines, switches and circuit breakers operating in that room. Your goal is 24/7 reliability, but your system can be impacted by similar systems in adjoining rooms. You have little or no visibility into problems with those neighboring systems. If your system goes down, there’s a chance everyone else’s could as well. Sounds easy, right?

Every day, men and women responsible for managing American’s energy grids face a similar situation in control rooms across the country. Now, a new project underway in California is field testing and demonstrating technology to revolutionize utilities’ ability to keep the lights on

The project is being led by Pacific Gas and Electric and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This effort centers on a state-of-the-art demonstration utility control room facility in San Ramon, California equipped with the latest advancements in synchrophasor technology. Synchrophasor systems are precise, synchronized grid measurements captured by Phasor Measurement Units, or PMUs.

Once installed at key junctions throughout the power grid, PMUs provide control room operators with real-time snapshots of the grid’s ‘health.’ These snapshots improve situational awareness by feeding their data directly to a utility’s existing Energy Management System (EMS). Once outage-causing issues have been identified through PMUs, operators can act more rapidly to prevent disruptions in the flow of electricity.

“If we borrow a medical analogy, synchrophasors help us take the pulse of the grid as often as 60 times per second, or even more,” said Vahid Madani Lead Synchrophasor Project Architect with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. “With that level of real-time visibility, we can continually monitor the power system arteries and potentially stop the grid equivalent of a heart attack long before it cascades to impact a large population of our customers.”

PG&E utilizes Alstom Grid’s Energy Management Systems and the company’s PhasorPoint synchrophasor solution as one element of its advance warning system.

Alstom Grid acquired Psymetrix in February 2011 and now offers field-proven, commercial Wide Area Management Systems (WAMS) based on the PhasorPoint synchrophasor technology. WAMS is now a key aspect of the electric utility grid control room. Equipped with synchrophasor measurements, WAMS deliver accurate snapshots of grid status 60 to 120 times faster than current SCADA technology. Psymetrix WAMS solutions manage the high volumes of PMU data produced and provide advanced PMU data analytics that extract clear, critical, and useful information for the operator.

“The San Ramon proof of concept (POC) test facility is not a theoretical laboratory,” added Jay Giri, Director of Power Systems Technology and Strategic Initiatives with Alstom Grid. “This is a living, breathing utility control room environment that allows us to test the next generation of EMS technology in a real-world setting. We have engineers, control room operators, network technicians and other experts working side-by-side to better understand and leverage the full diagnostic and corrective benefits of PMU applications. It is a very exciting project, and we are sharing our lessons learned with industry communities and government agencies as a means of establishing best practices for the industry.”

“The PG&E POC facility also has created an environment for validating the overall robustness of the project architecture and the end-to-end solution. Testing key technical interoperability standards is essential to the successful deployment of large scale production grade smart grid technology,” Madani added, reinforcing a May 2012 statement from the NERC.

In addition to making local grids more stable, synchrophasor technology enables utilities to identify disruptions in neighboring, interconnected grids and take steps to keep those issues from impacting their own operations.

The project is currently in the field installation stage. Following successful completion of these field tests, the San Ramon control room capabilities will eventually integrate with Pacific Gas and Electric’s grid.

So imagine you are a PGE operator sitting in the same room managing your own complex network, but now you can 'see' the real-time status of systems in your neighbors’ rooms. When issues arise in those rooms, you can take steps to prevent them from impacting your network. With WAMS, those operators will have more relevant information at a faster rate over a broader view than ever before.

Once PGE’s next generation Energy Management System moves to ‘real world’ operations, their customers across California likely won’t notice.

All they will notice is a more stable grid, and even fewer power outages…

Technical experts from the PG&E synchrophasor Proof of Concept team will provide a more detailed overview of the project in the September/October issue of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine. Check back soon for a link to that article.

Alstom Grid delivers the advanced equipment and expertise to power America's smarter, more reliable energy grid.