Recent developments in smart grid technology have spawned interest in the use of phasor measurement units to help create a reliable power system transmission and distribution infrastructure. Wide-area monitoring systems (WAMSs) utilizing synchrophasor measurements can help with understanding, forecasting, or even controlling the status of power grid stability in real-time. A power system Frequency Monitoring Network (FNET) was first proposed in 2001 and was established in 2004. As a pioneering WAMS, it serves the entire North American power grid through advanced situational awareness techniques, such as real-time event alerts, accurate event location estimation, animated event visualization, and post event analysis.

Traditionally, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) have utilized signals obtained from current transformers (CTs) to compute current phasors. Unfortunately, this requires that CTs must be directly connected with buses, transformers or power lines. Chapters 2, 3 will introduce an innovative phasor measurement instrument, the Non-contact Frequency Disturbance Recorder (NFDR), which uses the magnetic and electric fields generated by power transmission lines to obtain current phasor measurements.

The NFDR is developed on the same hardware platform as the Frequency Disturbance Recorder (FDR), which is actually a single phase PMU. Prototype testing of the NFDR in both the laboratory and the field environments were performed. Testing results show that measurement accuracy of the NFDR satisfies the requirements for power system dynamics observation.

Researchers have been developing various techniques in power system phasor measurement and frequency estimation, due to their importance in reflecting system health. Each method has its own pros and cons regarding accuracy and speed. The DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) based algorithm that is adopted by the FDR device is particularly suitable for tracking system dynamic changes and is immune to harmonic distortions, but it has not proven to be very robust when the input signal is polluted by random noise. Chapter 4 will discuss the Least Mean Squares-based methods for power system frequency tracking, compared with a DFT-based algorithm.

Wide-area monitoring systems based on real time PMU measurements can provide great visibility to the angle instability conditions. Chapter 5 focuses on developing an early warning algorithm on the FNET platform.