Verifying interoperability and application performance of PMUs and PMU-enabled IEDs at the device and system level

As a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding and other unrelated infrastructure investment plans in the utilities it is expected that the number of installed Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and PMU-enabled Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) will dramatically increase in the next 5-10 years. New applications using synchronized data will become an important part of the overall power system operation. The mitigation of the risk of using such elaborate high precision measurement infrastructure requires appropriate testing for interoperability and application performance at both the device and system level. This will assure accuracy consistency across multiple IED types, as well as future scalability and upgradeability, hence avoiding the costly infrastructure becoming a stranded asset. This paper addresses such demand as well as the methodology and tools that are used to verify the interoperability and application performance. The benefits and expected outcome are also outlined.