Calculating sequence impedances of transmission line using PMU measurements

An online transmission line (TL) impedance parameter identification system (TPIS) using PMU measurements was recently developed and implemented at China Southern Power Grid Company (CSG). Traditional approaches for TL impedance calculation only approximate the effect of conductor sags and ignore the dependence of impedances on temperature variation. Utilizing PMU measurements may improve the accuracy of TL parameters calculation. The challenge is that the parameters identified are very sensitive to noise and errors in PMU measurements, which are difficult to quantify and can be uncertain under different system operating/loading condition. TPIS provides an innovative yet practical problem formulation for TL sequence parameter estimation based on least-squares with linear constraints. A bootstrapping-based resampling technique is developed and a new metric is proposed to determine the credibility of the estimated sequence impedances. This paper discusses the proposed methodologies, challenges, as well as implementation issues identified during the development of TPIS.