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Classically, wide-area synchronized power system monitoring has been an expensive task requiring significant investment in utility communications infrastructures for the service of relatively few costly sensors. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the viability of power system monitoring from very low voltage levels (120 V). Challenging the accepted norms in power system monitoring, the document will present the use of inexpensive GPS time synchronized sensors in mass numbers at the distribution level. In the past, such low level monitoring has been overlooked due to a perceived imbalance between the required investment and the usefulness of the resulting deluge of information. However, distribution level monitoring offers several advantages over bulk transmission system monitoring. First, practically everyone with access to electricity also has a measurement port into the electric power system. Second, internet access and GPS availability have become pedestrian commodities providing a communications and synchronization infrastructure for the transmission of low-voltage measurements. Third, these ubiquitous measurement points exist in an interconnected fashion irrespective of utility boundaries. This work offers insight into which parameters are meaningful to monitor at the distribution level and provides applications that add unprecedented value to the data extracted from this level. System models comprising the entire Eastern Interconnection are exploited in conjunction with a bounty of distribution level measurement data for the development of wide-area disturbance detection, classification, analysis, and location routines. The main contributions of this work are fivefold: the introduction of a novel power system disturbance detection algorithm; the development of a power system oscillation damping analysis methodology; the development of several parametric and non-parametric power system disturbance location methods, new methods of power system phenomena visualization, and the proposal and mapping of an online power system event reporting scheme.

Using data from the frequency disturbance recorders (FDRs) that comprise the nation-wide frequency monitoring network known as FNET, disturbances in the eastern interconnected system (EI) have been monitored and recorded over the past several years. Analysis of this and other data by a wide variety of research scientists and engineers has rendered the idea that frequency disturbances from generator trips, transmission line trips, load trips, and other events, travel with finite speed as electromechanical waves throughout any power system (in this case the EI). Using FNET data as a tool, it is possible to measure and output the arrival times of these disturbance waves with a time resolution of 100 ms. To observe with certainty the arrival time of the frequency disturbance waves, field data collected by the FDRs must first be conditioned in a robust manner. The current method that uses the moving mean of raw FDR data is analyzed and two computationally efficient robust methods are suggested in this report. These new methods that rely on robust statistics are more resistant to the effect of outliers contained within the raw FDR data. Furthermore, like the moving mean, these methods smooth the raw data without removing the general trend. Having recorded and conditioned the FDR data, three conventional triangulation techniques taken from the field of seismology are proposed and analyzed. This study reconfirms the fact that the EI is not a medium of continuous elasticity though which the frequency perturbations travel but rather a discontinuous patchwork of varying elasticities. Within this report, nine generator trip events are analyzed and the aforementioned triangulation methods are applied. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. To conclude, axioms of future research are proposed and delineated.