An Efficient Surge Arrester Placement Strategy to Improve the Lightning Performance of Long Transmission Line

Installing surge arresters would enhance the transmission system reliability but it comes with extra capital expenditure. In order to determine the most efficient and cost-effective surge arrester configuration of the protected transmission line, a novel surge arrester placement strategy is proposed in this paper. According to the characteristic of the transmission line tower footing resistance, the entire transmission line can be divided into several line sections. Each line section consists of the towers which have similar footing resistance. Two different designs are considered for transmission line lightning protection: (i) equip different numbers of surge arresters on selected phase of each tower; (ii) equip surge arresters on all phases of selected towers. By varying the number of towers to be equipped or the number of phases to be equipped with surge arresters, the threshold voltage for line flashover is used to evaluate different surge arrester installation configurations.