Grant: Alliance Grants

Canada's power lines face extreme weather conditions across diverse landscapes. While they're built to handle wind and ice, there's a gap in considering specific wind effects in certain areas like mountains and specific irregular wind types like downburst. This leaves these lines vulnerable to local and irregular winds, making it risky as there aren't clear guidelines for assessing these risks. Working with CEATI, this project aims to create guidelines for accurately measuring how wind affects power lines in specific locations. This means safer designs for vulnerable areas. It also plans to better understand wind risks for existing lines in different terrains. The study focuses on designing guidelines that consider both regular and irregular wind loads such as downburst, aiming to revolutionize how Canadian utility companies, especially CEATI members, handle their power lines, improving their safety. The research will use innovative methods to map wind and ice accretion, calibrate load factors, use computer simulations to understand how wind behaves around different landscapes, how downburst interacts with powerlines and test how power line towers respond to these forces. The goal is to create guidelines that currently don't exist, ensuring power lines aren't overburdened in different landscapes and weather conditions. This collaborative project also gives an opportunity to train the much-needed work forces in the safe powerline design for extreme climate.