This thesis investigates the use of real-time phasor measurements for voltage and transient stability monitoring and control. Taking advantage of the ability of a Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) placed at a bus to sample at a fast rate the voltage and current phasors of that bus) various schemes for placing PMU's are considered and evaluated. These schemes include coherency based methods and pilot point placement techniques for system controllability. A novel scheme is proposed which places a minimal set of PMU's so as to make the system measurement model observable, and thereby linear. This placement scheme is derived from the topological observability theory. It concerns the building of a spanning measurement sub-graph across the system with actual or pseudo-measurement assigned to each of its branches. The minimal PMU set is found through a dual search algorithm which uses both a modified bisecting search and a simulated annealing-based method. The former fixes the number of PMU's while the latter look for a placement set that leads to an observable network. In order to accelerate the procedure, an initial PMU placement is provided by a graph-theoretic procedure which builds a spanning measurement sub-graph according to a depth-first search. From computer simulation results performed on various test systems, it appears that only one fourth of the system buses need to be provided with PMU's in order to make the system observable. In an effort to reduce the computing time of transient stability assessment, a dynamic equivalent is presented, which results from the elimination of the load buses provided with voltage--dependent loads. The elimination is performed through a new version of the Ward equivalencing method. In this approach, the equivalent current injections are expressed in terms of the retained bus angles and a sensitivity matrix. The non-linearity of the load flow model is accounted for through piecewise linear approximations by updating the sensitivity matrix whenever the operating point moves beyond the validity of the linearization. The expressions of the incremental changes in the generator electric power is derived. The study also investigates the possibility of using the telemetered data provided by the PMU's during pre-fault and post-fault operating conditions in conjunction with a. new version of the Extended Equal Area Criterion (EEAC) method. The latter is able to handle complex loads through the dynamic Ward equivalencing method. The performance of the approach is illustrated on three test systems which have been reduced to the internal generator nodes. / Ph. D.