Evaluation of Power System Lightning Performance - Part II: Application to an Overhead Distribution Network

The paper aims at defining a methodology to evaluate the lightning performance of a system of overhead distribution lines. As is well known, the evaluation of the lightning performance relies generally on a Monte Carlo approach that generates many different lightning events and calculates the corresponding overvoltages. To perform such calculation, the power system computer aided design (PSCAD) module developed in the companion paper is adopted. However, as any call to PSCAD implies a nonnegligible computational effort, here an efficient approach is presented in order to limit the number of simulations as much as possible. The obtained results are compared with the ones provided by other available techniques both on simple structures in order to highlight the main features of the method and on a typical Italian distribution network segment. The comparative analysis shows good agreement between the methods and the effectiveness of the proposed technique in terms of computational effort reduction.