Visualization of Power Systems and Components

Notice Concerning Copyright Material PSERC members are given permission to copy without fee all or part of this publication for internal use if appropriate attribution is given to this document as the source material. This report is available for downloading from the PSERC website. DOE CERTS program. We also thank the many industrial advisors who helped to contribute to the success of this project, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students who participated in the human factors experiments. i Executive Summary The need for enhanced power system visualizations has been increasingly acute over the last decade as the size of power system models has grown. For example, North America planning power flow models can have more than 44,000 buses, and state estimator models can have even more nodes. And with the development of competitive, optimal power flow (OPF) based electricity markets, new study variables (such as locational marginal prices) have increased as well. Finally, large-scale blackouts around the world recent have dramatically demonstrated how a lack of operational " situational awareness " can put millions in the dark. Our research shows that good visualization techniques improves the efficiency of operator response to power system problems. As the electricity industry becomes increasingly competitive, knowledge concerning the capacity and constraints of the electric system will become a commodity of great value. In an environment where electricity markets can be fast changing, participants can obtain a competitive advantage by understanding the implications of these changes before others. One goal of this project was to develop innovative methods to assist players in the electricity industry to extract and visualize this knowledge from the large set of power system data. The project explored the visualization of data macroscopically and microscopically, i.e., visualization of the power system as a whole as well as individual power system elements. This report, along with the related publications, present results from the PSERC " Visualization of Power Systems and Components " project. The research focused on (1) the development and/or enhancement of techniques for visualizing power system information, (2) the development of techniques for visualizing power system component information, and (3) performing human factors experiments and analysis on the visualizations developed in the project. The specific results from the project can be grouped into four areas. First, the project developed enhanced two-dimensional (2D) power system visualizations. A key accomplishment in this area was demonstrating how selective filtering …