  For decades, power system stabilizers paired with high initial response
automatic voltage regulators have served as an effective means of meeting
sometimes conflicting system stability requirements. Driven primarily by
increases in power electronically-coupled generation and load, the dynamics of
large-scale power systems are rapidly changing. Electric grids are losing
inertia and traditional sources of voltage support and oscillation damping. The
system load is becoming stiffer with respect to changes in voltage. In
parallel, advancements in wide-area measurement technology have made it
possible to implement control strategies that act on information transmitted
over long distances in nearly real time. In this paper, we present a power
system stabilizer architecture that can be viewed as a generalization of the
standard $\Delta\omega$-type stabilizer. The control strategy utilizes a
real-time estimate of the center-of-inertia speed derived from wide-area
measurements. This approach creates a flexible set of trade-offs between
transient and small-signal response, making synchronous generators better able
to adapt to changes in system dynamics. The phenomena of interest are examined
using a two-area test case and a reduced-order model of the North American
Western Interconnection. To validate the key findings under realistic
conditions, we employ a state-of-the-art co-simulation platform called HELICS
to combine high-fidelity power system and communication network models. The
benefits of the proposed control strategy are retained even under pessimistic
assumptions of communication network performance.
