Blackouts in several power systems around the world have accentuated the need of new methods for improving the reliability of vital electrical power systems. One of the best methods to solve this problem is to find better ways to monitor the power disturbance by providing real-time and historical data analyzing tools. The electric power grid expands every day and by default pushes the operating limits to the maximum. In order to control and prevent wide scale cascading outages, taking measurements of power flows through the grid is essential. On March 22, 2006 IEEE Power Engineering Society published a standard for “Synchrophasors for Power Systems” (IEEE C37.118). IEEE addressed the definition of phasor measurements, time synchronization, and protocol for communication with phasor measurement units (PMU).
Shortly afterwards the IEEE C37.118 standard was universally adopted by hardware manufactures. Nevertheless, the need to capture, process and analyze the data still was not satisfied.
In April 2006 ReLab began developing the universal OPC device driver, which fully addresses the need of collecting, processing and analyzing the phasor data. With clear confidence in reliability, accuracy and performance of our products, ReLab introduces the first Syncrophasor IEEE C37.118 OPC Device Driver to the market (RLSYNC).
As of November 20th, 2006 the product is generally available and can be immediately downloaded shipped upon request.