The NASPI (North American SynchroPhasor Initiative) working group brings together power engineers and other people from electric utilities, from power equipment vendors, and from academia. NASPI's objective is to improve the reliability, throughput, efficiency, and economics of the electric power grid by accelerating the widespread deployment of devices called PMUs (Phasor Measurement Units). A PMU makes fine-grained time-synchronized measurements of the electrical state of a particular point on the grid.

I attended the 20th NASPI Working Group meeting in Knoxville, TN on March 11-12, 2014. The NASPI Working Group is a voluntary organization of electric power engineers, technical managers in power-related corporations, vendors of products supporting power transmission, and academics in the power field.

NASPI (North American SynchroPhasor Initiative) has been funding a large-scale deployment and application of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) in the electric power grid. This relatively small advance in technology is expected to lead to major improvements in the reliability and efficiency of the grid. The NASPI Work Group, an informal organization of the people concerned with NASPI, has been meeting two or three times a year since 2006. This organization has been developing standards and interoperability guidelines needed to meet the NASPI goals.

On February 20-21, 2013, I attended the Working Group meeting of NASPI  (the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative) in Huntington Beach, California. This Working Group includes several hundred EEs and a few computer scientists, working towards standardization and deployment of instrumentation for monitoring and control of electric power transmission grids around the world. The goal is a significant increase in reliability and efficiency of high voltage transmission.