Analysis of a disturbance localization method for incidents in continental Europe

Abstract

To localize incidents such as generator trips or load shedding, which cause transients in power systems, a technique from seismology is used in this paper: triangulation by means of information from Phasor Measurement Units (PMU). The synchronized observation of frequency change arrival times, which represent an electromechanical disturbance propagation, allows to approximate the disturbance location and thereby to support a reliable power system operation. For the verification and further development of this method a post analysis of three incidents of last years in the Continental Europe synchronous area (CESA) power system is done using two different numerical methods to solve the set of triangulation equations. The calculated deviations of estimated to real locations show on the one hand a relative good approximation to the real incident locations, but also a high dependency on the assumed electromechanical disturbance propagation speed and the chosen parameters of signal processing. Nevertheless, the method seems to be promising for future applications and is worth to be further developed.