Towards More Flexible and Robust Data Delivery for Monitoring and Control of the Electric Power Grid

Abstract

URL for this paper: www.gridstat.net/TR-GS-009.pdf Abstract—With the increase in the monitoring of status data at very high rates in high voltage substations and the ability to time synchronize these data with GPS signals, there is a growing need for transmitting this data for monitoring, operation, protection and control needs. The sets of data that need to be transferred and the speed at which they need to be transferred depend on the application – for example, slow for post-event analysis, near real-time for monitoring and as close to real-time as possible for control or protection. In this paper, we overview the requirements for the next-generation power grid’s communication infrastructure in the areas of flexibility and quality of service, with extensive citations of power industry practitioners and researchers, and analyze implementation options. We also overview technologies in the computer science field of distributed computing that can be brought to bear to help meet these requirements, yet to date have not been discussed in the context of grid modernization. Additionally, we argue against the industry trend of using either TCP/IP or web services for real-time data exchange for fast controls. We then describe GridStat, a novel middleware framework we have developed that is suitable for the power grid and its application programs. Test results demonstrate that such a flexible framework can also guarantee