A Case Study on 500 kV Line Performance Related to Lightning in Malaysia

Lightning-related outages are of great concern for power utility companies especially in the tropical regions. Tenaga Nasional Berhad as the system operator in Malaysia realized the importance of this issue. In this paper, statistical information on transmission line outages, together with lightning stroke data, are presented. Lightning data were obtained from TNB Lightning Detection Network which generates lightning density map and other information, such as peak current, polarity, and location of the detected strokes with 500-m location accuracy. A case study on the 500 kV A-to-B line represents statistical information of collected strokes where 18 kA and 14 kA were reported as median values of current peak for negative and positive strokes, respectively. Mean values are 22 kA for negative strokes and 17 kA for positive strokes. About 93% of 658 619 collected strokes from 2004 to 2015 are negative whereas the remaining are positive. A total of 582 (90%) negative strokes and 65 (10%) positive strokes were recorded along a selected case line where 83% of outages were reported to occur on the top phase. Lightning stroke density, terrain characteristics, tower footing resistance, and monsoon activities were highlighted as contributing factors on line performance due to lightning in this study.