Section: D.4.2.0 Overview
Content: In order to avoid region- or even nation-wide power outages, wide-area power system protection is on the rise. "When a major power system disturbance occurs, protection and control actions are required to stop the power system degradation, restore the system to a normal state, and minimize the impact of the disturbance. The present control actions are not designed for a fast-developing disturbance and can be too slow. Local protection systems are not able to consider the overall system, which can be affected by the disturbance. Wide area disturbance protection is a concept of using system-wide information and sending selected local information to a remote location to counteract propagation of the major disturbances in the power system." [15]. Protection actions include, "among others, changes in demand (e.g. load shedding), changes in generation or system configuration to maintain system stability or integrity and specific actions to maintain or restore acceptable voltage levels." [16]. One specific application is phasor measurement for the stabilisation of the alternating-current phase in a transport network. For this, the voltage phase is measured locally and sent to a remote-control centre. There, this information is processed, and automated actions are triggered. One action can be the submission of telegrams to power plants, instructing them to either accelerate or deaccelerate their power generators in order to keep the voltage phase in the transport network stable. A comprehensive overview of this topic can be found elsewhere in the literature [17]. This kind of automation requires very low end-to-end latencies (5 ms) [16] and―due to its critical importance for the operation of society―a very high communication service availability (99,9999%).