An investigation of the impact of synchrophasors measurement on multi-area state estimation in active distribution grids

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of synchrophasors measurement from a number of phasor measurement units (PMUs) on multi-area state estimator (MASE) in the distribution grid (DG). The benefits are largely in the form of improved state estimation (SE) accuracy. An important decision in the implementation of PMU-based SE is the optimal selection of the channel capacity of the PMUs. This decision becomes more important for the distribution systems because of larger number of measurement points as compared to the transmission system and also because of higher cost of PMUs with more measurement channels. Further, critical measurement analysis is important as they indicate the robustness of measurement system. In this paper to compare the robustness of the measurement system and the accuracy of SE, various performance metrics were compared for conventional, infinite channel and PMUs with limited number of channels. Therefore, an important contribution of the present work is the impact analysis of different number of PMU channels on the accuracy of the results of MASE and also on the measurement robustness for distribution networks. The results presented are expected to be useful for the utilities when designing a PMU-based MASE for the distribution grids.