Electricity sector precision timing uses and needs
| Application | Precision needed | Benefits: qualitative description | Counterfactual | Technical impact metric | Economic value metric | Potential magnitude of impacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event reconstruction | 1 ms | Accurate time tags greatly speed up event reconstruction, helping to prevent future events | Manual time stamping and longer event reconstruction time | Frequency, magnitude, and duration of blackouts | Economic impact of outages | High |
| Phasor measurements | 5-6 μs | Monitors grid instability and increases grid efficiency | Less efficient grid system | More efficient dispatch and reduced transmission losses | Fuel and increased capacity requirements | High |
| System time and frequency | 5-50 ms | Line frequency is used by end users as a time standard (clocks in appliances) | Less accurate clocks. Not an issue for appliances but impact other apps | Increased cost for some applications needing time standards | Low | |
| Billing and power quality incentives | 50 ms: Billing 1 ms: Power quality harmonics | Customers typically monitor themselves, and utility bill estimates need to match; thus, accurate time is key | Less reliable M&V for harmonics incentive programs | Impacts due to incentive program (partial attribution) | Value of load shifting and improved power quality | Low |
| Traveling-wave fault detection | 0.1 μs | More precisely locate the point of fault | Longer ground-based search time | Speed time to identifying and fixing faults on large transmission lines (300-500 M spans) | Value of reducing the duration of the outage | High |
| Application | Precision needed | Benefits: qualitative description | Counterfactual | Technical impact metric | Economic value metric | Potential magnitude of impacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event reconstruction | 1 ms | Accurate time tags greatly speed up event reconstruction, helping to prevent future events | Manual time stamping and longer event reconstruction time | Frequency, magnitude, and duration of blackouts | Economic impact of outages | High |
| Phasor measurements | 5-6 μs | Monitors grid instability and increases grid efficiency | Less efficient grid system | More efficient dispatch and reduced transmission losses | Fuel and increased capacity requirements | High |
| System time and frequency | 5-50 ms | Line frequency is used by end users as a time standard (clocks in appliances) | Less accurate clocks. Not an issue for appliances but impact other apps | Increased cost for some applications needing time standards | Low | |
| Billing and power quality incentives | 50 ms: Billing 1 ms: Power quality harmonics | Customers typically monitor themselves, and utility bill estimates need to match; thus, accurate time is key | Less reliable M&V for harmonics incentive programs | Impacts due to incentive program (partial attribution) | Value of load shifting and improved power quality | Low |
| Traveling-wave fault detection | 0.1 μs | More precisely locate the point of fault | Longer ground-based search time | Speed time to identifying and fixing faults on large transmission lines (300-500 M spans) | Value of reducing the duration of the outage | High |
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