A Proposal for Allocating PMUs for Monitoring Critical Oscillation Modes in the Mexican System

As a result of the deregulation and restructuring processes, the electric industry has experienced dramatic changes. Reorganization into generation, transmission and distribution units is the present trend worldwide. The continuous growth of the electricity consumption and the big difficulties for building new transmission lines is forcing to operate the power system closer to their security limits. Since the system reliability must be maintained, no matter how stressed is the operating condition. Electric utilities are employing state-of-the-art technology to monitor critical indexes to ensure a secure operation of the system. This paper proposes an approach to allocate PMUs for monitoring critical oscillation modes in a power system. The approach is based on Modal and Prony analysis and the paper reports the application of this in preliminary studies for creating a Wide Area Measurement System in the Mexican Power System aimed to monitor critical oscillation modes.