Power grids are the vital life lines of any modern society that can be easily affected by blackouts and outages. These power grids however have remained unchanged over many decades and are collapsing. Automated fault identification and monitoring the smooth operation of the system considered to be one of the key challenges in smart grid development. To add to this, the complex and stochastic nature of environment factors have made fault identification heavily dependent on human experiences and intelligence. This paper thus explores the operating modes of the grid followed by the need of failure identification system. This paper further focuses on modernizing the transmission grid through application of ICT technologies by processing the continuously large amount of data coming into the transmission grid; perform real-time monitoring of grid conditions which in turn can help the control room operator to respond quickly to the grid problems.

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Power grid failures Failure identification state of operation Communication mechanism Information and communication technology (ICT)