Advances in electronics, computer and information technology are fueling major changes in the area of power systems instrumentations. More and more microprocessor based digital instruments are replacing older type of meters. Extensive deployment of digital instruments are generating vast quantities of data which is creating information pressure in Utilities. The legacy SCADA based data management systems do not support management of such huge data. As a result utilities either have to delete or store the metered information in some compact discs, tape drives which are unreliable. Also, at the same time the traditional integrated power industry is going through a deregulation process. The market principle is forcing competition between power utilities, which in turn demands a higher focus on profit and competitive edge. To optimize system operation and planning utilities need better decision making processes which depend on the availability of reliable system information. For utilities it is becoming clear that information is a vital asset. So, the utilities are now keen to store and use as much information as they can. Existing SCADA based systems do not allow to store data of more than a few months. So, in this dissertation effectiveness of compression algorithms in compressing real time operational data has been assessed. Both, lossy and lossless compression schemes are considered. In lossless method two schemes are proposed among which Scheme 1 is based on arithmetic coding and Scheme 2 is based on run length coding. Both the scheme have 2 stages. First stage is common for both the schemes. In this stage the consecutive data elements are decorrelated by using linear predictors. The output from linear predictor, named as residual sequence, is coded by arithmetic coding in Scheme 1 and by run length coding in Scheme 2. Three different types of arithmetic codings are considered in this study : static, decrement and adaptive arithmetic coding. Among them static and decrement codings are two pass methods where the first pass is used to collect symbol statistics while the second is used to code the symbols. The adaptive coding method uses only one pass. In the arithmetic coding based schemes the average compression ratio achieved for voltage data is around 30, for frequency data is around 9, for VAr generation data is around 14, for MW generation data is around 11 and for line flow data is around 14. In scheme 2 Golomb-Rice coding is used for compressing run lengths. In Scheme 2 the average compression ratio achieved for voltage data is around 25, for frequency data is around 7, for VAr generation data is around 10, for MW generation data is around 8 and for line flow data is around 9. The arithmetic coding based method mainly looks at achieving high compression ratio. On the other hand, Golomb-Rice coding based method does not achieve good compression ratio as arithmetic coding but it is computationally very simple in comparison with the arithmetic coding. In lossy method principal component analysis (PCA) based compression method is used. From the data set, a few uncorrelated variables are derived and stored. The range of compression ratio in PCA based compression scheme is around 105-115 for voltage data, around 55-58 for VAr generation data, around 21-23 for MW generation data and around 27-29 for line flow data. This shows that the voltage parameter is amenable for better compression than other parameters. Data of five system parameters - voltage, line flow, frequency, MW generation and MVAr generation - of Souther regional grid of India have been considered for study. One of the aims of this thesis is to argue that collected power system data can be put to other uses as well. In particular we show that, even mining the small amount of practical data (collected from SRLDC) reveals some interesting system behavior patterns. A noteworthy feature of the thesis is that all the studies have been carried out considering data of practical systems. It is believed that the thesis opens up new questions for further investigations.