Implementation of a Wide Area Monitoring System for the Power Transmission Grid of Bangladesh

Electricity is transmitted from generating stations to distribution substations through an interconnected transmission grid. This transmission grid is the backbone of a region's power system. Therefore, centralized monitoring, supervision, and controlling are necessary to ensure grid stability and uninterrupted power supply. As the conventional Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system used for grid controlling and monitoring cannot measure the dynamic stability of the transmission grid, major blackouts and power outages happen frequently. To improve grid monitoring, a Wide Area Monitoring System (WAMS) consisting of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) synchronized with a Global Positioning System (GPS) is suggested here. An algorithm is developed to find the optimum locations of PMUs to monitor each bus in the system. The algorithm is implemented on IEEE 14 bus, 24 bus, and 30 bus systems to determine the PMU's location for complete system observability and results are compared with existing algorithms in the literature. Finally, the algorithm is applied to the power transmission grid of Bangladesh to obtain the optimal PMU buses for monitoring the dynamic stability of the grid.