KY | Supa Dexta - 7/10/2025 06:20 How do power lines deal with lightning? They must get hit much more commonly than electric fences.
Same deal there, main transmission line (161 KV, 500 KV) towers are all grounded substantially and have lightning arrestors wired in to each phase. Most also have a ground wire that is the high point of the line that is tied directly to ground at each tower, and usually the lightning will go for those being the highest and being the least resistance to ground by not having any arrestors and therefore little resistance in the line. Still not uncommon to blow large fuses at substations, which is where a lot of your 15-30 minute localized outages come from. Funny timing, as I just got off of a call about a main step-up transformer at a generating station that was damaged late yesterday evening due to suspected lightning as a storm passed through. The first plant I ever worked at had lightning counters in the switchyard. There are a lot of lightning strikes on a power line each year, but only a few are severe enough to overcome the protection scheme in place. |
Does a guy have to spend $4k on a Gallagher fencer?
