Experiences on Use of State Estimator in Power System Operations

Veera Raju Vinnakota, Ph.D., has over 30 years of professional experience in the field of electric power monitoring and in the areas of EMS applications, DMS applications, Training Simulations, very Large networks studies. Since May 2023, he is an independent EMS and ADMS consultant. Prior to being a consultant, he worked for California ISO (CAISO) from 2013 and was engaged in network applications support for power grid reliability and energy markets. While at CAISO, he mainly focused on state estimator technology and on quantitative approach in supporting state estimator with identifiable targets to realize SE solution quality. Prior to that, Dr. Vinnakota was an invited professor at the University of Liege, Belgium, where he helped in establishing a Control Centre Laboratory. He also worked for BC Hydro, Canada, for more than 12 years supporting EMS network applications for the control room operations. Dr. Vinnakota designed, developed, and implemented the first real-time state estimator in the Indian power sector in the mid-80s. He has over sixty publications and presentations in the field of electric power monitoring and control for real-time use and co-authored two chapters on phasor applications for the book on ' Power System Grid Operation Using Synchrophasor Technology Springer' (Springer, 2019). He has delivered numerous invited talks to various IEEE PES chapters and IEEE PES conferences and chaired several panel sessions in the areas of energy management system applications, including voltage control, reactive power control, state estimator, and phasor applications for control room use. He also served as Chair of IEEE Power Engineering Society, Vancouver Section, British Columbia, Canada during 2003-2005. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a registered Professional Engineer in the province of British Columbia, Canada, and is a practicing engineer. His main areas of interest are power system monitoring and control using EMS and ADMS systems. Dr. Vinnakota received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Power) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Sarma (NDR) Nuthalapati, Ph.D., is the founder of NDRS SEMS Consultancy LLC in Austin, Texas. Prior to being a consultant he worked for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc. (ERCOT) with the Advanced Network Applications Group of the Operations Support Department from 2007 to 2016. At ERCOT, he was involved in the area of energy management system (EMS), network applications and was active in a synchrophasor project funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the Smart Grid Initiatives Grants. Later he also worked for PEAK Reliability at Vancouver, Washington, and Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) as Principal Engineer and Supervisor for Energy Management Systems, respectively. As a consultant, Dr. Nuthalapati provided his services to Dominion Energy, Electric Power Group (EPG) and GE. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, USA and at the National Institute of Technology, Warangal (NITW), India. He actively participates in the IEEE Power Engineering Society and in the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI) Working Group meetings. Dr. Nuthalapati is the editor of the book on 'Power System Grid Operation Using Synchrophasor Technology' (Springer, 2019) and the book on 'Use of Voltage Stability Assessment and Transient Stability Assessment Tools in Grid Operations' (Springer, 2021). He is a senior member of IEEE and Power Engineering Society. He earned his BTech (Electrical Engineering) and MTech (Power Systems Engineering) degrees from the National Institute of Technology Warangal, India in 1983 and 1986 respectively, and obtained his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 1995.