This paper presents a new phasor measurement unit (PMU)-based wide-area damping control (WADC) method to suppress the critical inter-area modes of large-scale power systems. Modal participation factors, estimated by a practically model-free system identification approach, are used to select the most suitable synchronous generators for control through the proposed WADC algorithm. It is shown that multiple inter-area modes can be sufficiently damped by the proposed approach without affecting the rest of the modes, while only a few machines are needed to perform the control. The proposed technique is applied to the IEEE 68-bus and the IEEE 145-bus systems, including the test cases with PMU measurement noise and with missing PMUs. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the good adaptivity of the control strategy subjected to network model changes, its effective damping performance comparing to power system stabilizers (PSSs), and its great potential for near real-time implementation.
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