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Pole Line Hardware


A New Age for Toughened Glass Insulators - With Clarity Comes Safety

INTRODUCTIONIn 2005 an article about toughened glass insulators (TGI) titled “Return to Clarity” was published. Fifteen years later, this sequel article by a team including the two original authors, picks up where the former concluded with optimism about the future of TGI technology...

Underground Distribution


Utility Proactively Tests Underground Cable

Distribution companies are continually looking for ways to improve system reliability, all while conserving capital investments and operational costs. With an aging infrastructure, one of the main issues that utilities face is a way to assess the actual condition of their capital assets. With...

Overhead Distribution


Outage Management: Restore Power in Less Time

Improving power grid reliability is a major goal of the electric power industry and can reduce economic losses, lost productivity, and customer inconvenience from power disruptions. For several utilities, Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) funding accelerated the application of fault location,...

Wire and Cable


Cable Testing Comes of Age - One Cycle at a Time

Field Testing of MV and HV cables has come a long way in recent decades. Gone are the days of old, when the traditional DC (Direct Voltage/Current) hipot was the recommended method for testing these modern cables that form the critical backbone of the distribution electrical power network....

Vegetation Management


FERC Complaint Targets Duke, PJM Transmission Planning

A coalition of large energy consumers and ratepayer advocates has filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), urging the agency to prohibit transmission owners from independently planning "local" transmission projects exceeding 100 kilovolts (kV). The coalition argues...

Disaster & Recovery


Fighting Wildfires to Increase Pole Protection

Evaluating pole selection for increased protection BY BUTCH BERNHARDT, North American Wood Pole Council The number of wildland fires reached record levels in many states in 2014, prompting questions about what poles perform more efficiently in fires: steel or wood. Research from a bulletin...

Overhead T&D

RTU and HMI Redundancy in Electrical Substations

As the substation RTU takes on more applications, such as Human-Machine-Interface (HMI), alarm annunciation, math & logic and “relay communication processing”, its need for high availability increases. Anything that takes the RTU out of service – configuration change, firmware update, or component failure – means not only loss of SCADA but also loss of local visibility, loss of non-operational data and, in some applications, loss of local control. Redundancy can address the needs for higher...

Overhead T&D Articles