NASPI is a group of volunteer representatives from the utility industry, manufacturers, vendors, academia, national laboratories, government agencies, and standards-making bodies. The mission of NASPI is to improve electric grid resilience, reliability, security, and affordability by accelerating the adoption and standardization of higher-fidelity time-synchronized measurement technologies, applications, and architectures.
Since 2003, NASPI has been instrumental in advancing the deployment of phasor measurement units (PMUs) and the use of the synchrophasor measurements they produce. Synchrophasors provide grid operators with greatly improved wide-area visibility by being synchronized to a common time reference and typically reported 30 times per second (100 times faster than conventional SCADA technology).
The NASPI community addresses evolving industry needs with a broader array of measurement technologies and deployment approaches. Some of the current areas of interest include:
- Higher fidelity technologies, including synchro-waveform measurements
- Power system data quality
- Oscillation analysis (inter-area, subsynchronous, etc.)
- Multi-sensor analytics
- Characterizing the transient behavior of IBRs and other fast-acting phenomena
- Statistical analysis and deep learning to extract actionable information from large datasets
- Networking and communications technologies (advanced architectures)
Much of NASPI’s impact in these areas of interest is due to the ongoing volunteer work that occurs within its task teams. These teams develop and promulgate best practices in the following topic areas:
- The Control Room Solutions Task Team (CRSTT) works to advance the use of real-time applications to improve control room operations and grid resilience and reliability.
- The Engineering Analysis Task Team (EATT) develops, tests, and validates engineering applications, assists in their deployment and utilization, and recommends R&D activities.
- The Data and Network Management Task Team (DNMTT) provides guidance for data networking, archiving, and access issues, and reviews new archiving and networking technologies.
- The Distribution Task Team (DisTT) fosters the use and capabilities of synchronized measurement data at the medium-voltage distribution level.
The task teams are a foundational part of NASPI's success and incubators for new ideas and approaches to solve common problems. Task team members work together to solve these problems and work across task teams to address cross-cutting issues. To get involved in a task team or join the NASPI mailing list, send an email to naspi@pnnl.gov.
NASPI is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy with support from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute.