Surge Arrester Placement for Long Transmission Line and Substation

Prior work in literature has illustrated the benefits of using surge arrester as a way to improve the lighting performance of the substation and transmission line. Installing surge arresters would enhance the system reliability but it comes with an extra capital expenditure. This thesis provides simulation analysis to examine substation-specific applications of surge arrester as a way of determining the optimal, cost-effective placement of surge arresters. Four different surge arrester installation configurations are examined for the 500/230 kV Rudd substation which belongs to the utility, Salt River Project (SRP). The most efficient configuration is identified in this thesis. A new method “voltage-distance curve” is proposed in this work to evaluate different surge arrester installation configurations. Simulation results show that surge arresters only need to be equipped on certain location of the substation and can still ensure sufficient lightning protection.

With lower tower footing resistance, the lightning performance of the transmission line can typically be improved. However, when surge arresters are installed in the system, the footing resistance may have either negative or positive effect on the lightning performance. Different situations for both effects are studied in this thesis.

This thesis proposes a surge arrester installation strategy for the overhead transmission line lightning protection. In order to determine the most efficient surge arrester configuration of transmission line, the entire transmission line is divided into several line sections according to the footing resistance of its towers. A line section consists of the towers which have similar footing resistance. Two different designs are considered for transmission line lightning protection, they include: equip different number of surge arrester on selected phase of every tower, equip surge arresters on all phases of selected towers. By varying the number of the towers or the number of phases needs to be equipped with surge arresters, the threshold voltage for line insulator flashover is used to evaluate different surge arrester installation configurations. The way to determine the optimal surge arresters configuration for each line section is then introduced in this thesis.