Fault Monitoring and Phasor Based Wide Area Measurement System in Assessing Performance

The GCC Interconnection Project has connected the electricity grids of six Arab Gulf countries along the Gulf to share power, reduce overall spinning reserve, reduce need for installed generation capacity for reserve, provide support during emergency and black out situations, and offer opportunities to trade energy with other regions.

The GCC Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) operates the Interconnection grid from its control center at Ghunan (ICC) and is mandated to ensure high availability of the assets, manage power flows between the participating countries and maintain system stability under different operating scenarios.

To assist in this GCCIA has commissioned a Fault Monitoring System (FMS) and phasor based Wide Area Monitoring System (WAMS) to evaluate performance via ‘post mortem’ analysis of transient events, for example line trips, switching, oscillations, power swings and frequency disturbances, as well as ‘real time’ display of operational data such as voltage magnitude, load, phase angle, frequency and system oscillations.

The FMS was commissioned in 2012 and early results have already produced interesting data on system performance.