Low‐loss Image‐based Compression for Synchrophasor Measurements

Deployments of high-sampling rate synchronised phasor measurement units (PMUs) are growing rapidly throughout the world, and with the advent of microPMUs, spreading from bulk transmission through distribution systems. The growing volume of PMU data presents challenges in its communication and storage, motivating consideration of compression algorithms. This study presents a novel lossy compression algorithm that exploits particular characteristics of power system measurements to improve the compression. Concepts successfully applied in image compression are tailored to the spatio-temporal correlations induced between electrical quantities via their network interconnections. The quality of the resulting compression is judged on the balance of storage space savings versus the accuracy of data reconstruction. In representative real-world and transient simulation datasets, the technique developed can provide storage compression in the range of 40:1 when different physical quantities are compressed together. The compression ratios can be in the range of 90:1 for voltage magnitudes and 190:1 for frequency when the measurements are compressed separately. The high-compression ratios are achieved while maintaining low-loss (high-accuracy) reconstruction.