The developments of large-scale AC/DC hybrid power grid put forward higher requirement for power system stability and control in space and time. The synchronous measurement data of WAMS can meet the above requirements, thus it’s quite necessary to study the application of WAMS technology in power system. Based on the structure and principle of WAMS, we give a detailed analysis and summary of the recent five year’s research and application of WAMS in power system dynamic monitoring, fault analysis, identification and estimation, system stability and control and wide area protection, as well as the existing problems. Finally we look forward to the further research of wide area technology, point out that it’s a very meaningful research to build a wide area safety monitoring and control system for large-scale interconnected power system based on WAMS technology.