FNET/GridEye for Future High Renewable
Power Grids — Applications Overview
Shutang You, Member, IEEE, Jiecheng Zhao, Wenxuan Yao, Yong Liu, Member, IEEE, Yi Cui,
Ling Wu, Jiahui Guo, Yilu Liu, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— Integration of renewable generation sets high
requirements for real-time situational awareness of power
systems. FNET/GridEye, a synchrophasor measurement network
for wide-area power system monitoring has been assisting real-
time situational awareness and helping improve reliability in
many power grids for 14 years. To aid operators confronting
challenges from growing renewables, FNET/GridEye continues
increasing its measurement accuracy and enhancing its
functionalities. This paper provides an overview on the most-
recent FNET/GridEye application improvements that help power
grid operation with high renewable penetration. The real-time
applications presented in this paper include event location,
oscillation monitoring, inertia estimation, and islanding detection.
Index Terms— FNET/GridEye, synchrophasor measurement,
renewable generation, power grid applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Renewable is growing in power grids worldwide. High
renewable power grids have many new characteristics
compared with conventional power grids and need special
attention of operators and planners [1-3]. For example,
renewable generation outputs are much more volatile than
conventional generation due to resource availability. The
volatility and dynamics of renewable generation constitute
challenges that are more complex and set higher requirements
on real-time situational awareness of power grids [4].
Renewable generation will change dynamics of the power
systems and induce new issues on many conventional aspects,
such as inter-area oscillation and frequency response [5].
Taking electromechanical wave propagation as an example, the
increase of renewable generation penetration will make
electromechanical wave propagate faster due to reduced inertia.
In addition, the uneven distribution of renewable energy
resources will result in uneven distribution of renewable
generation, which further adds the inhomogeneity of the
distribution of electromechanical wave propagation speed. The
inhomogeneous wave propagation speeds in power grids will
impair the accuracy of locating disturbances.
Besides utility-scale development, renewable generation is
also increasingly emerging on the grid edges (i.e. distribution
systems). Microgrids are becoming common configurations for
end-users to allow distributed renewables integration, higher
reliability and more flexibility. However, the real-time
information of these microgrids on the grid edges are difficult
This work was supported primarily by the Engineering Research Center
Program of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy
under NSF Award Number EEC-1041877 and the CURENT Industry
Partnership Program.
Shutang You, Jiecheng Zhao, Wenxuan Yao, Yong Liu, Yi Cui, Ling Wu,
Jiahui Guo and Yilu Liu, are with Department of EECS, the University of
978-1-5386-5844-4/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
to collect and becomes a blind zone for distribution system
operators [6].
Synchrophasor measurement is an important situational
awareness tool in the power grid. Its high data-reporting rate
and GPS synchronization equips system operators
unprecedented capabilities on real-time awareness of the power
grid status [7]. As a pioneer in distribution-level synchrophasor
technology, FNET/GridEye is a wide-area power grid
monitoring system being deployed worldwide. With its sensors
installed at the distribution system, FNET/GridEye can measure
frequency, voltage phase angle, and voltage magnitude, etc.
Based on FNET/GridEye, various applications have been
developed and are operating online for real-time power grid
situational awareness. In addition, multiple new applications
are being developed or tested to improve situational awareness
and the resilience of power grids with high renewable
penetration.
In the rest of the paper, Section II gives an overview on
FNET/GridEye, including the sensor and the system
architecture. Section III presents FNET/GridEye applications
for supporting the high renewable power grids. Four real-time
applications will be presented: event location, inertia
estimation, oscillation monitoring, and islanding detection.
Section IV is the conclusion.
II. FNET/GRIDEYE OVERVIEW
The sensor of FNET/GridEye is called the Frequency
Disturbance Recorder (FDR). FDR can be installed on
household power outlets, providing extra scalability compared
with commercial PMUs. Monitoring power systems from the
distribution level, FNET/GridEye allows situation awareness
capabilities on the grid edges, which is beyond the monitoring
area for conventional wide-area measurement systems.
Compared with transmission-level PMUs, distribution-level
FDRs are more robust to voltage harmonics, which is inevitable
in distribution systems.
FDR measures the frequency, voltage phase angle, and
voltage amplitude from 120V household power outlets (FDRs
at other common distribution voltage levels are also available).
FDR hardware includes a voltage transducer and A-D module
for raw sampling, a DSP to estimate the frequency and phase
Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA. (E-mails: (syou3; jzhao27; wyao3;
yliu66; ycui17; lwu24; jguo7; liu)@utk.edu,).
Yilu Liu is also with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN,
37831, USA.
For more information on FNET/GridEye: http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/
If interested in hosting an FDR and make power grids more resilient, please
contact Dr. Yilu Liu (liu@utk.edu).
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angle, as well as GPS synchronization and communication
modules.
Since the first FDR prototype was developed in 2004, three
types of FDRs have been produced and deployed [8-10]. Fig. 1
shows the second-generation FDR, which has the largest
deployment number. The third generation FDR incorporates
even more accurate algorithms and synchrophasor
measurement hardware, as well as power quality monitoring
functions so that it can provide harmonics analysis results.
To further reduce the cost, a smartphone-based version of
FDR has been developed in FNET/GridEye. The smartphone
grid monitoring APP can be downloaded online and installed
on any Android-based devices. Leveraging the built-in
computational power of smartphones, the smartphone-based
FDR becomes even cheaper for household deployment. In
addition, as a smartphone itself has the Network Time Protocol
(NTP) timing source, it can provide synchrophasor
measurement data where the GPS signal is unavailable. Testing
results show that the accuracy of a smart-phone based FDR is
similar to that of a full-version FDR.
Fig. 1. The second-generation Frequency Disturbance Recorder
(FDR)
Fig. 2. Smartphone based FDR [11]
Fig. 3. FDR deployment in the U.S. mainland by 2017
The deployment map of FDRs in the U.S. mainland by 2017
is shown in Fig. 3. FDRs send data through Internet to the data
servers located at the University of Tennessee. Fig. 4 shows the
architecture of the FNET/GridEye data architecture. The data
concentrator performs data condition and alignment. Then the
aligned and conditioned data are transmitted to the online
application server and storage server. The real-time application
server is configured to send detected event alerts to subscribers
in real time. The off-line application server allows data retrieval
for event replay and analysis [12].
Fig. 4. The data architecture of FNET/GridEye
III. APPLICATIONS OF FNET/GRIDEYE TO SUPPORT HIGH
RENEWABLE POWER GRIDS
As a low-cost easy-to-deploy wide-area power grid monitoring
system, FNET/GridEye can be used for situation awareness and
help improve the resilience of the power grid under high
renewable penetration. This section present four representative
real-time FNET/GridEye applications: event location,
oscillation monitoring, inertia estimation, and islanding
detection.
A. Event Location
Locating a power grid event is to estimate the geographic
location of the disturbance when a contingency happens in
power grids [13, 14]. The event location information can help
operators take appropriate countermeasures. The event location
application, as well as real-time event reporting, has been
developed in FNET/GridEye. An example of the event report is
shown in Fig. 5. The estimated event location is shown by the
red circle and the disturbance information is provided in the
table.
Conventional methods for event location apply the
triangulation approach and assume that the wave propagation
speed distribution is even for the whole system. The latest
FNET/GridEye event location method incorporates feature
selection and machine learning. The new method has been
tested on over 3,000 historical disturbances recorded by
FNET/GridEye. The accuracy of disturbance location and
power mismatch estimation has been improved. Approximately
70% of the power disturbances are correctly located. More than
80% of the power mismatch can be estimated with less than
10% error. Since the new method does not assume a uniform
propagation speed, which is an assumption of the conventional
triangulation-based methods, the event location and magnitude
can be estimated accurately. This feature is very useful for high
renewable power grids where wave propagation speeds are very
unevenly distributed.
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Fig. 5. FNET/GridEye event information report
Fig. 6. Estimated and actual event location and estimated power
imbalance for one event in FNET/GridEye
B. Oscillation Monitoring
Power system oscillations typically refer to ring-down
oscillations between generator rotors, and therefore oscillation
can be monitored and analyzed by the synchronized frequency
measurements. Poorly damped oscillations are harmful to the
system stability and security [15]. These poor-damping or wide-
area influencing oscillations are more of operators and
planners’ concern. FNET/GridEye measurement can be used to
detect oscillations and analyze the oscillation frequency,
damping ratio, and oscillation modes [16, 17]. Fig. 7 shows the
two-step process in FNET/GridEye for real-time oscillation
detection and oscillation analysis.
Power grid oscillation features, including oscillation
frequency, mode and damping ratio, often vary with system
conditions, such as inertia and impedance. For example, in Fig.
8, the blue curve shows the statistics distribution of one-year’s
oscillation occurrence in different hours of a day in the U.S.
Eastern Interconnection, while the black curve shows the hourly
load profile. It can be noticed that the two profiles are
negatively correlated mainly because of the inertia change. As
renewable penetration increases in power grids, oscillation can
possess more volatile features and become more difficult to be
damped. For example, inter-area oscillation frequency and
damping will change as renewable penetration increases. Other
oscillations, such as sub-synchronous oscillations and the
oscillations induced by renewable generation controllers, can
become new concerns for system reliability. Using both ring-
down data and ambient data, FNET/GridEye can help operators
keep fully aware of these oscillations and help assess potential
risks. Fig. 9 shows the real-time oscillation report generated by
FNET/GridEye. Key information in the oscillation report
includes oscillation analysis results, as well as plots of
measured frequency and voltage phase angles.
Fig. 7. Real-time oscillation detection and analysis in
FNET/GridEye
Fig. 8. Relevance analysis between oscillation magnitudes and
load levels using FNET/GridEye data
C. Inertia Estimation and Low Inertia Report
Inertia is important for maintaining power system frequency
stability. As renewable penetration increases, the inertia of
power grids will decrease [18, 19]. Fig. 10 shows the U.S.
Eastern Interconnection (EI) frequency response under the base
case and the 80% renewable penetration scenario [20]. It can be
seen that the frequency decline rate is much larger for the 80%
renewable penetration scenario than the base case scenario after
the same contingency. By analyzing the rate of change of
frequency (ROCOF) and the event magnitude, FNET/GridEye
can detect low inertia conditions of power grids [21], as shown
in Fig. 11. After a low inertia condition is detected, a report on
the low inertia condition is sent to system operators or
stakeholders in real time, as shown in Fig. 12.
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Fig. 9. FNET/GridEye oscillation event analysis report

Fig. 10. Frequency response after a generation loss event in the

EI Fig. 12. A report of low inertia conditions in FNET/GridEye
D. Islanding Detection
As more renewables are expanding as DERs in microgrids, the
operation conditions of microgrids add more time-variant
factors and new features to distribution systems. Situational
awareness of distribution grids, especially microgrids, becomes
more important and complicated for distribution system
operators [6]. Due to the relatively low cost and convenient
deployment, FNET/GridEye possesses high potential to aid the
situational awareness of distribution systems and microgrids.
The FDR-measured voltage phase angle, voltage magnitude,
frequency, and harmonics data at each household can be
Fig. 11. Identification of low inertia conditions using combined and used for a variety of applications that help
increase the resilience of distribution system and integration of
FNET/GridEye data
more DERs. As an example, Fig. 13 shows the frequency
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profiles of a system with an associated microgrid, which first
switched to the islanding mode and returned to the grid-
connection mode after around 2 minutes. Robust algorithms has
been developed and implemented in FNET/GridEye to
distinguish islanding events from other events, for example
oscillation and generation trip events, which have similar
footprints to some extent. Fig. 14 shows the real-time display
of the islanding microgrid location on a map. This information
will help system operators keep aware of the operation modes
of multiple microgrids in real time. In addition, this application
can be combined with grid topology, GIS information and other
distribution system operation tools for more advanced and
complex applications.
Fig. 13. The frequency profiles including islanding and
reconnection of a microgrid measured by FNET/GridEye
Fig. 14. Microgrid islanding display in FNET/GridEye
IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper summarized four representative applications in
FNET/GridEye that are helpful for monitoring power grids.
These real-time applications: event location, oscillation
monitoring, inertia estimation, and islanding detection can help
system operators keep better aware of system changes and risks
in real time. Since system dynamics including oscillation,
inertia, and power flow pattern may change dramatically with
renewable growth, these verified applications are particularly
useful for operating power grids with high renewable
penetration.
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