Electrical Substations

Substation Protection

Storm-Hardened Switchgear

How to protect electrical equipment from Mother Nature BY ROBERT A. MURPHY, Trayer Engineering Corporation The U.S. National Weather Service called Hurricane Sandy the most destructive storm of 2012’s unusually active Atlantic hurricane season. Sandy delivered unprecedented damage across a wide...

Substation Technologies

Latest Power Outage Statistics and Causes Tracker

As the world’s technological landscape continues to grow and the demand for electricity increases, so too do the occurrences of power outages. Check out Critter Guard’s curated list where we track power outages statistics and data below or check out our power outages infographic. Power...

Lightning Protection

Lightning Discoveries & Technologies

How this phenomenon affects electric utilities BY JIM SIEBERT, FOX 26 Chief Meteorologist Advances in technology are helping scientists understand lightning in ways that were not possible a few years ago. Beforehand, meteorologists primarily studied lightning, focusing most of their efforts on...

Substation Testing & Maintenance

Sweep Frequency Response Analysis

Sweep frequency response analysis: Reliable demagnetization of transformer cores BY MARKUS PÜTTER, MICHAEL RÄDLER, BORIS UNTERER, OMICRON electronics GmbH Whenever a power or distribution transformer is isolated from the power system, it is very probable that residual magnetism remains in the...

Physical Security & Monitoring

The Fight Against Animal-Caused Power Outages

Every day across North America, animals enter electrical substations in search of warmth, food, shelter, or simply out of curiosity. What often begins as routine wildlife behaviour can escalate quickly into serious grid reliability issues. In many service territories, wildlife intrusion is now the...

Breakers & Relays

Protective Relay Frustrations

Solving misoperation with line parameter measurements BY WILL KNAPEK, OMICRON USA Between 80 to 90 percent of all power system faults involve ground. Many protective relaying schemes depend on ground distance protection to accurately sense and locate ground faults on multi-terminal sub-transmission...

Home Transformation Electrical Substations

Properly Grounded Substations

Adequate utility grounding improves power quality, but more importantly, it is essential for worker safety as well as public protection. Design is critical in maintaining a safe equipotential environment all around the substation.

Construction is important to accommodate fault currents without leaving the substation with dangerous potential gradients.

A tester must establish a sufficiently low resistance to remote earth so that operation remains within safe parameters. Similarly, safe step and touch potentials must be...