College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

The concept of situation awareness was first proposed in the fields of space and cyber security, and then involved in the field of power systems. In recent years, the global scholars have extensively discussed the application of situation awareness technologies in power systems. In this background, the real-time operation state identification, the operation trend prediction, and the situation visualization technologies of power systems are respectively mapped to the three elements of situation awareness defined by Endsley (i.e. “perception”, “comprehension”, and “prediction”). And the wide-area control and risk dispatching are mapped to the “decision action” in situation awareness. The event detection, event identification, risk prediction, situation visualization technology, wide-area control, and risk dispatching of power systems are reviewed and analyzed. The ideas of existing methods are described. Finally, the deficiencies of existing research on situation awareness of power transmission systems are pointed out, and the artificial intelligence and big data technologies are regarded as the future research direction to solve the issues in situation awareness of power systems.