Power Lines
When an overhead power line is either exposed to a high amount of icing, covered by wet snow or affected by strong winds, disturbances to the power supply may arise. In extreme cases it may even result in structural damages or even tower collapse causing grid outages. All power lines need to be designed to withstand the local climatic conditions, including extreme loads caused by wind and icing. On the other hand, over-engineering is expensive, and represents an unnecessary economical cost to the society. Proper design of the power line system is therefore critically dependent on knowledge about the local climatic conditions.
Kjeller Vindteknikk has during the last 10 years been carrying out close to 170 projects with more than 20 different customer from several countries with regards to calculation of the climate loads for design of power lines using the state-of-the-art in-house LineLoads simulation modelling tool. We are globally recognized by TSOs, grid operators, telecom industry and many others by our specialist knowledge regarding the application of detailed meteorological models combined with various analyses of local wind and icing conditions.
Visualization of an icing simulation for a planned overhead power line
A few highlights:
- Our services can be used both when constructing new power lines as well as when reconductoring and voltage upgrading existing lines.
- Our reports provide the necessary meteorological input for design of overhead power lines according to international standards.
- Our numerical simulation model LineLoads has years of scientific research as background and LineLoads model results have been presented at numerous international conferences such as CIGRE, IWAIS and WinterWind.
- The numerical simulations can be used all around the world, even in remote areas far from nearest measurement site.
- We produce local or even national ice load and extreme wind maps presented as e.g. 50-year return values.
- Our numerical simulation provide local information as well as long term climatology of wet snow accumulation, rime icing, freezing rain and wind, and we analyse to which extent the combined loads should be applied in the design of each individual line.
- The assessed power lines cover all voltage levels from 22kV to 420kV AC and 500kV DC.
Photo of a test span at Ålvikfjellet, Norway.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information!