SIMEFAS: Wide Area Measurement, Protection and Control System in Mexico

This chapter reports on the development of a Wide-Area Measurement System in Mexico entitled SIMEFAS (Sistema de Medición Fasorial). It has been designed to increase the security and integrity of Mexico’s electric power system. Current development of SIMEFAS includes five regional PDCs to which phasor data is sent by PMUs spread over the National Electrical System. Developed applications include model-validation, computation of operation and performance curves, automatic generation and load shedding, adaptive relaying, and CCVT monitoring. SIMEFAS’s architecture as well as future development plans are also presented. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a description of SIMEFAS and the initial deployment stage of the system. Section 3 discusses the structure of the Mexican National Electrical System and of SIMEFAS. In Section 4, the main applications that have been deployed and considerations for the deployment of future applications are presented. In Section 5, the architecture and hierarchy levels of SIMEFAS is presented. Section 6 discusses the Local Control and Protection Actions Using Synchronized Phasor, and in the section 7 the Wide Area Protection Scheme using PMUs in SIMEFAS is presented.