Grid Awareness Under Normal Conditions and Cyber-Threats

Abstract

The situational grid awareness is becoming increasingly important for power system operations due to smaller operational margins, wide range of uncertainties entailed by renewables and highly critical infrastructure failures due to potential cyber-attacks. In this chapter, we look at some of the state-of-the-art technologies to monitor events in a power system under normal operating condition, followed by detection algorithms for regular business risk events, such as faults and equipment failures, and finally, we look into methods for quantifying vulnerability of under the rare and men-orchestrated cyber-attacks. First, we outline an architecture of a central piece of today’s grid awareness system, Wide Area Monitoring, Protection and Control technology. Next, we review an event detection method used to identify and record faults and failures in the grid. Finally, we present a method for vulnerability assessment of grids under cyber-attacks.