REN ordered to Efacec an innovative Wide-Area Monitoring System, for its transmission networks monitoring. The need of electric power networks monitoring, at the European level, became clear during the serious incident occurred in November 2006, when the European network was split into three “islands”, due to an outage at the German’s transmission grid. As a result, it was necessary to carry out a wide frequency shedding.
In Portugal, great part of that task was performed by Efacec systems. The Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE), in order to prevent similar events, promoted a set of actions, among which real time monitoring and measurement of the power network state play an important role, a task which is assured by REN in Portugal.
The scope of the Efacec supply includes the configuration, integration and commissioning of the remote monitoring system, composed by one central system, to be installed at the National Dispatch and by Phasor Measurement Units (PMU), to be installed at REN’s Recarei transmission substation.
At the substation level, the PMU units operate as acquisition units, measuring the voltage samples, time-tagged by a synchronized GPS clock, and transferring those measurements through a TCP/IP network to the central system. At the National Dispatch, the central system concentrates and processes that information, thus supplying the operator with data for electric network management optimization. The central system, with its flexible architecture, is prepared for future expansions, being able to integrate new PMU units from different vendors.
With this system, REN shall grant a more secure network management and a greater awareness regarding the operation conditions, and consequently, it will be able to respond quicker to different emergency circumstances.
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