Real-Time Area Angle Monitoring Using Synchrophasors: A Practical Framework and Utility Deployment

This article develops a practical framework of Area Angle Monitoring (AAM) to monitor in real time the stress of bulk power transfer across an area of a power transmission system. Area angle is calculated from synchrophasor measurements in real time to provide alert to system operators if the area angle exceeds pre-defined thresholds. This article proposes a general method to identify the warning threshold of area angle and a simplified method to quickly update area angle thresholds under significant topology change. A mitigation strategy to relieve the area stress is also proposed. In order to handle the limited coverage of synchrophasor measurements, this article proposes a method to estimate phase angles for boundary buses without synchrophasor measurements, which extends the application scenario of AAM. AAM is verified for a power transmission area in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council system with both simulated data and synchrophasor measurements recorded from real events. A utility deployment for real-time application of AAM with livestream and recorded synchrophasor data is described.