Wide-area monitoring of the North American power grid: An integrated portfolio of real-time reliability tools

An integrated portfolio of wide-area real-time reliability tools is addressing one of the major recommendations from the most recent blackouts in North America's Eastern and Western interconnections: The lack of common, simultaneous, adequate and accurate reliability information during major disturbances. The functional specifications for the tools were defined through guidance provided by NERC reliability Subcommittees and Reliability Coordinators addressing wide-area real operational reliability problems. The tools' intelligent alarms, multi-view, geo-graphic displays and automatic reliability reports enable Balancing Authorities and Reliability Coordinators to rapidly and jointly interpret and use consistently presented real-time data to monitor load-generation-frequency resources adequacy and grid health. The data and functional architectures are being adapted to make the tools useful for the integration of emergent dynamic distributed systems into the traditional centralized systems of today. The paper focus on the most intensively used tools, and illustrates how the tools are used in practice with five examples drawn from four interconnections.