  A power system electromechanical wave propagates from the disturbance
location to the rest of system, influencing various types of protections. In
addition, since more power-electronics-interfaced generation and energy storage
devices are being integrated into power systems, electromechanical wave
propagation speeds in the future power systems are likely to change
accordingly. In this paper, GPS-synchronized measurement data from a wide-area
synchrophasor measurement system FNET/GridEye are used to analyze the
characteristics of electromechanical wave propagation in the U.S. Eastern
Interconnection (EI) system. Afterwards, high levels of photovoltaic (PV)
penetration are modeled in the EI to investigate the influences of a typical
power-electronics--interfaced resource on the electromechanical wave
propagation speed. The result shows a direct correlation between the local
penetration level of inverter-based generation and the electromechanical wave
propagation speed.
