Towards a Colombian Power System Fully Supervised with PMU: Scalability Test of the iSAACnet Communications Network

The Synchrophasor initiative in Colombia, led by the Colombian Electric Power System Operator XM, has deployed a Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) aimed to increase the supervision capabilities, promote new automatic control/protection schemes and improve situational awareness. Currently there are over 120 phasor measurement units (PMU) installed across the country, all of them integrated to the National Control Center (CND by its Spanish name). As the energetic transition of the country continues, several changes in the regulatory framework will take place in the short term, and as a consequence it is expected that in the next five years about 2000 new PMU will be deployed in substations, conventional power generators and renewable energy resources. The continuously growing amount of data produced by the WAMS compared with the traditional approach poses new challenges from the point of view of signal processing, data management and network infrastructure. Since 2008, XM has conceptualized and implemented a communications network dedicated to information traffic associated with the operation of the national electricity grid, mainly synchrophasors. iSAACnet, as it is known, works under the publisher / subscriber paradigm, in which information flows on a data bus and each node can produce or consume information on demand, with the particularity that in iSAACnet each node is an intelligent decision device (iDD) capable of performing advanced processing and serve as multiprotocol gateway. iSAACnet is currently composed of six nodes distributed in substations, the data bus is backed by a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network. This paper reviews the history of the use of synchrophasor measurements in Colombia, and shares the efforts that XM has made to achieve in the short term having a scalable communications network oriented to the management and processing of information associated to the national grid operation.