Bulk power grids may encounter major blackouts, due to increasing complication in operation and control of interconnected power grids, as well as lack of exchange of information. Therefore, advanced methods for monitoring, control and protection of large scale systems are essential. These methods are particularly important for a possible future interconnection between the European and Russian electricity transmission systems. The ICOEUR project is a three-year collaborative European Union (EU)- Russian project led by the TU Dortmund University (Prof. Dr C. Rehtanz) (on the EU side) and the Energy Systems Institute (Prof. Dr N. Voropai) (on the Russian side).

The project is co-funded by the European Commission (EC)’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and the Russian Federal Agency on Science and Innovations. In the project, a new generation of state estimators was developed. It provides European and Russian Transmission system operator (TSO)s with an accurate snapshot and robust indicators of the system state even during emergency situations. The key technologies on which this new state estimators are based is the Wide area monitoring system (WAMS) technology, where time-synchronised measurements are combined with a central data concentrator and distributed state estimators. In the context of the ICOEUR project this newly developed estimator system was tested by simulations in a large scale network as well as in a large scale implementation of the WAMS system.

Significant progress has been made in fast stability assessment methods aiming to identify instable modes of large scale power systems due to improper voltage or angle deviations as well as inter-area oscillations. Realisation of such a system is possible under combined utilisation of strategic placed Phasor measurement unit (PMU)s, centralised data collection and efficient stability assessment algorithms.

The ICOEUR project has delivered tools to support the cooperation of TSOs in maintaining individual and general system stability. Local protection systems are activated selectively, systematically and in a coordinated way. These tools address individual and general system stability issues in order to maintain stability of the interconnected wide area system as large as possible.