A New Methodology for the Grounding Design of Transmission Lines and Windfarm Towers

The grounding of the structures of an overhead transmission line (OTL) is designed to meet a specified maximum resistance, accounting for lightning performance, as expressed by the expected outages/km/year. Overhead transmission line (TL) and wind farm (WF) tower groundings are typically dimensioned for each structure using individual 1D geoelectrical models derived from electrical soundings with Wenner or Schlumberger arrays. This paper presents an alternative methodology to the traditional tower-by-tower ground modeling, applying a statistical treatment to the complete set of geoelectrical soundings available for the