The super sessions and technical panel sessions at this year's IEEE PES T&D World Conference were well-attended. According to Gene Wolf. official blogger for the show, most sessions were standing-room only.

The "Reliability" track was no different. "Lightning Performance of Overhead Lines" was held on Tuesday, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and was chaired by John McDaniel of National Grid.

Lightning is a major root cause of momentary and sustained outages on transmission and distribution systems. With an increasing emphasis on power quality issues, it can be cost-effective to make improvements in line insulation or to apply line surge arresters.

Each panelist focused on a different aspect: low-cost ways to improve impulse strength to meet induced overvoltage requirements, methods to evaluate the electrical duty of arresters on shielded and unshielded lines, and advice from user experiences to ensure that effective improvements also have a long service life.

The session included the following presenters (contact IEEE PES for proceedings):

08TD0225 Mitigating Lightning Outages on 138 kVTransmission Lines
S. LODWIG, Sargent & Lundy LLC

08TD0508 Long Term Analysis Of Line Arrester Application Field Study
W. ZESSIN, ComEd
J. MCDANIEL, Nationalgrid

08TD0695 Electrical Performance of Fiberglass Crossarm in Distribution
and Transmission Lines
S. GRZYBOWSKI, Mississippi State
University
T. DISYADEJ, Mississippi State University

08TD0634 A Study on lightning protection of 110kV transmission Line in Qinghai-Tibet Railway
R. LI, Southwest Jiaotong University
G. WU, Southwest Jiaotong University
X. CAO, Southwest Jiaotong University
X. REN, Southwest Jiaotong University
S. LI, Southwest Jiaotong University

08TD0640 Update from the Weather Normalization Task Force
T. SHORT, Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI)