Towards smarter transmission grid: Mahatransco Experience

India faces major challenge both today and for the future to achieve the growth and improvement in reliability of its electrical infrastructure. With India working in One Nation-One Grid-One Frequency regime, power system management, operation and control becomes a challenging task further calling a need for adoption of SMARTER and better technologies for grid management. Currently system operator in the Load Despatch Centre do not have information about relay indications, their behaviour, DRs etc. readily available with them, but in the absence of such information synchrophasor technology can assist system operator in understanding behaviour of the system in real time, which can further assist system operator to take necessary actions to maintain power system stable. It is observed that, disturbance in the power system usually develops gradually, but the time scale in which the dynamics of the disturbances affects the grid may vary from several milliseconds to minutes, depending on the initiating event and system conditions. This paper describes some of executional and operational aspects related to implementation of smarter technology in grid operation, monitoring and control like Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS). There can be various synchrophasor based applications those can be developed, like performance evaluation of protection system, Model validation, integrating synchrophasor system with SCADA system and developing analytics based on it etc. With the maturity of synchrophasor project various applications like stability monitoring, oscillation monitoring, and protection system enhancement can be deployed. Developing adaptive protection based on WAMS and subsequent analytics can also be considered as future activities. This paper attempts to cover analysis of occurrence in the grid using WAMS technology, its comparison with traditional analysis practices adopted of utilizing Disturbance Recorders (DRs) of numerical relays. Apart from this, it includes India's initial experience of working with WAMS and Situational Awareness system.