PNNL

Abstract

The application of information visualization holds tremendous promise for the electric power industry, and yet its potential has not been sufficiently exploited by the visualization community. Prior work on visualizing electric power systems has been limited to depicting raw or processed information on top of a geographic layout. Little effort has been devoted to maximize the analytical strengths naturally gained by the visualization itself. This paper introduces a visualization system prototype, known as GreenGrid, that explores the planning and monitoring of the North American Electricity Infrastructure. For the purposes of visualization, the power infrastructure can be described as a network of nodes and links. The nodes represent the electrical buses where generators and loads are connected, while the links represent the transmission lines that interconnect the buses. This paper focuses mainly on a customized technique within GreenGrid that is designed to visually identify abnormal characteristics of the electricity infrastructure. In particular, we examine an extreme event that occurred within the Western United States power grid on August 10, 1996. We compare our study results with the conclusion of the post-disturbance analysis and find that many of the disturbance characteristics can be readily identified with the proper form of visualization. The paper includes a lessons learned discussion to evaluate the visualization application.