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.