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Research and Engineering Application of Power Grid Large-Scale Ice-Disaster

Prevention and Treatment Technology

LU Jia-zheng, ZHANG Hong-xian, FANG Zhen, LI Bo, JIANG Zheng-long,

ZHOU Wei-hua, XU Xun-jian, TAN Yan-jun, LUO Jing, ZHAO Chun, GUO Jun
Hunan Electric Power Research Institute, Power Transmission and Distribution
Equipments Anti-icing and Reducing-disaster Technology Key Laboratory of State Grid
，Changsha 410007 China

SUMMARY
Ice disasters of power grid have occurred in more than 100 countries all over the world. Ice
disaster is one of the biggest natural disasters posing great threat on the safe operation of power grid.
Ice disaster may cause broken down of transmission lines, collapse of towers, and may even lead to
severe paralysis of large area power grid. Our research team has carried out a series of researches on
the icing of power grid ever since 1998, including icing forecasting, icing monitoring, insulator
flashover and direct-current (DC) ice-melting technology. Through revealing the “Sun-Surface-
Atmosphere Coupled” icing formation rules for power grid, we have developed the first power grid
icing forecast system in the world. This system has high prediction accuracy in short-term, medium-
term and long-term power grid icing forecast. Besides, we have invented the image anti-fogging
method for monitoring conductor icing, and proposed the icing thickness intelligent identification
technology for the wire. Based on these technologies, we have developed the power grid icing
monitoring and decision making system. The regularity of iced insulators flashover is also revealed,
and we have invented the anti-icing composite insulator, which could decrease the line icing flashover
rate by 90%. Series of DC de-icing techniques and equipments have been developed based on our
proposed core technology of “impedance flow” rectifier transformer. These equipments have less
harmonic, and can well meet the requirements of the standard with the reliability as high as 100%. The
proposed technology has been widely used on 1,023 transmission lines of 132 corporations in 8
provinces in southern China, and has been applied to fight against several frozen rain and snow
disasters in 2009-2013 with accurate prediction, reliable monitoring, and high ice melting efficiency. It
has constructed the scientific and complete supporting system for ice disaster prevention of the power
grid, and can also provide cost-effective solutions for the management of ice disasters.

KEYWORDS
Icing Disaster; Icing Prevention; Icing Forecast; Icing Monitoring; Anti-Icing; DC Ice-melting;
Supporting System

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1 Introduction
Grid ice storms occur in dozens of countries throughout the world, and the ice storms could cause
collapse of towers and large-area grid paralysis. They are treated as the greatest disaster for the safe
operation of power grid. From January 5th to 10th, 1998, a severe snow and ice storm hit the US and
Canada, causing serious damages to the regional power grid in Eastern Ontario, southern Quebec in
Canada, upstate New York, parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. For the grid in Quebec, it
led to the collapses of more than 1,000 transmission towers and more than four hundred million power
outages. In early 2005, China Hunan power grid suffered a severe icing disaster, which caused severe
damages [1]. In 2008, several provinces in southern China suffered a particularly severe icing disaster
[2-7], and more than 70 million of transmission lines and towers were collapsed, which led to direct
property loss of more than RMB250 billion. The power supply disruption caused by the icing disaster
affected almost millions of users, led to the power outage of the Beijing-Guangzhou railway for seven
days, and greatly impacted on people’s normal life and social stability.
After the catastrophic icing disaster took place in Canada in 1998, people in the power industry
around the world started to focus on the study of large-scale power grid icing disaster. A huge
investment should be made to improve anti-icing design standards of power grid. However, the power
company cannot bear the increasing economic cost. It is urgent to develop new icing disaster
prevention and control techniques. International counterparts involved in the power grid icing disaster
prevention work have carried out some positive explorations. Our research team has carried out some
research work in this field for more than 10 years, and made breakthroughs in power grid icing
forecasting, ice monitoring, insulator flash and anti-icing DC ice-melting technology.
2 Law and prediction of grid icing
In 2008, an icing disaster took place abruptly, while because of its unpredictable nature,
countermeasures cannot be prepared in advance. Power companies suffered heavy losses. Grid icing
forecasting can help to make early deployment with various preventive measures. Grid ice forecasting
is related to electromagnet, meteorology, geography and many other factors, and these factors are
coupled with each other. To make accurate prediction is extremely difficult.
Based on the grid glaze data in the past sixty years, we have discovered 17 key factors related to
grid icing, including sunspots, grid terrain, polar vortex, and so on. Also, we have come to several
conclusions such as “particularly severe icing disasters always occur in extreme years of sunspots
(Figure 1)”. The “Sun-Surface-Atmosphere Coupled” formation law (Figure 2) for grid icing is
revealed for the first time. It is described as: The sun cyclical activities affect the atmospheric
circulation, in the northern winter, the north cold air and southwest moist air intersection continuously,
under the action of terrain toward the mountains, the cold air sinks, warm air climbs, to form a stable
inversion layer (altitude greater than 0°C, the ground below 0°C) and freezing rain, which causes
tower collapse to form a large-scale grid icing disaster. The “Sun-Surface-Atmosphere Coupled”
formation law has been verified in the grid icing processes of eight southern provinces since 2008.
Grid icing disaster-prone areas and conditions of icing disaster are obtained by applying the grid icing
law. Northern China is usually snowy but less likely to suffer from grid icing in winters, as its
temperature either at the ground level or at the high altitude is below 0°C.

Figure 1 Sunspots vs. Icing Level

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Figure 2 Icing Forming Theory
In general, international weather forecasts do not predict grid ice thickness. To make up for the
shortage, we established an integrated grid ice growth model, which covers the electromagnetic,
weather, heat and other related factors. Ice thickness calculation formula is proposed based on heat
balance and wind-induced drop collision mechanism. It provides an effective solution to the numerical
prediction of grid icing. With these theories and techniques, it is easy to make short-term and medium-
term predictions of power grid ice thickness. In light of the above-mentioned research results, we have
developed the world’s first automatic grid ice forecasting system (Figure 3). This system fills the
blank in the field of grid icing research and has been successfully applied in Hunan, Jiangxi and other
eight provinces of China since November 2008. The ice forecasting results were published in State
Grid Corporation of China. After verification of the China State Grid Corporation, prediction accuracy
rates (Figure 4) of long-term, medium-term and short-term ice are as high as 100%, 83.5% and 98%.
These results have provided valuable lead time for fighting against the icing disasters, improving
effectiveness and efficiency of the disposal of grid icing disasters.

Figure 3 Power grid ice automatic forecasting system

Figure 4 The real and prediction result of short time icing climate forecast
3 Grid ice monitoring and early warning technology
Due to the poor environment of transmission line, existing monitoring devices are difficult to
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monitor ice under poor visibility conditions. After analyzing the features of ice images captured by
monitors and comparing different image processing techniques, we proposed a novel image anti-fog
method. This method could eliminate the influence of water or fog on image acquisition, and ensure
the fidelity and color saturation of images (Figure 5).

(a) Original image (b) Processed by the image anti-fog method

Figure 5 The image anti-fog method
Besides, existing monitoring devices cannot directly get the ice thickness of conductors. To
overcome this problem, a method is proposed to automatically identify the ice thickness based on
thresholding of image characteristics. Figure 6 shows the schematic diagram of this method. The
identification error is less than 10% and can get recognition accuracy up to 1mm.

after
thresholding

Figure 6 Automatic identification of ice thickness

Based on the methods described above, our research team has developed a highly reliable system
for automatic monitoring of power transmission line. This system is designed as low-power supply
and anti-jamming. With this system, we can obtain the weather, stress and ice thickness of
transmission line in real time. 340 sets of this system have been deployed in Hunan, Guangdong and
other provinces with severe ice disasters. The reliability rate of this system is up to 92%. The
reliability of our system ranked first according to the verification of the China State Grid Corporation.
Traditional anti-icing emergency decision is always made manually with low efficiency and high
security risk. Based on characteristics of the icing disasters, we have established ice disaster
emergency decision-making models and methods through analyzing various early warning models and
decision algorithms (Figure 7). At the same time, we have developed the grid ice disaster emergency
automatic decision system. With this system, the decision-making speed can be increased by 95% and
the accuracy is also highly improved.

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Figure 7 Ice disasters intelligent decision-making methods
4 Anti-icing composite insulators
Ice-covered insulators can be easily bridged. This will cause line tripping, even result in large-
area blackout in severe cases. In this situation, it is urgent to remove the ice from insulators.
Generally, this is done artificially. During the icing disaster in 2008, six electricity workers died in
anti-icing. Through a large number of simulation experiments and on-site verification, we have
confirmed that the flash is mainly due to the joint action of ice contamination and icing. Accordingly,
we creatively put forward a novel style of composite insulator with large diameter plate and long
spaced. This type of composite insulator has several advantages as follows:
(1) Delay the ice bridge;
(2) Cover the small cap by bigger ones, then filthy production during ice crystals melting can be
significantly reduced.
After the electric field calculation and optimization design, we have invented the anti-icing
composite insulators, and test results showed this type of insulators could extend anti-ice ice bridging
time by 11.3 times and improve the ice lightning pressure from 16% to 22%. In November 2008, the
composite insulators were successfully applied in the 500kV and 220kV transmission lines. Flash
tripping accidents did not occur during the past four years (Figure 8). This type of composite
insulators can significantly reduce tripping icing flashover rate by 90%, and avoid the artificial anti-
icing in the tower to ensure the safety of human life.

Normal Insulator Anti-ice Insulator

Bridging Un-bridging
Figure 8 Application of anti-icing flash insulator
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5 DC Ice-Melting technology and equipments
Existing methods and communication technologies (such as robot) have low efficiency in ice-
melting and cannot meet the power requirements of a wide range of ice disaster prevention. DC ice-
melting technology has been attracted great attention because of its high efficiency. The existing
international DC ice-melting technology, which employs three-phase thyristor rectifier, is always with
serious harmonic and easy to cause damage to expensive equipments (such as transformers). Generally
speaking, large-capacity filter device is installed to reduce the harmonic. This will occupy large area,
and is very difficult for widespread applications.
Through analyzing the structure and magnetic properties of ice-melting transformers, a new
method is proposed to reduce the harmonic by harmonic magnetic potential internal offset. We have
invented a continuous coil winding method with multi-conductor pairs. Based on these technologies,
we have developed a special type of rectifier transformer with 12-pulse (Figure 9). Diode rectifier
mode is put forward. In this way, the heat can be reduced by 30%, and the power factor can be
increased up to 0.95. Besides, this type of equipments is air-cooled and easy to maintain. The
harmonic content is the minimum compared to similar international devices and meets the GB/T14549
standards. These devices don’t need the traditional bulky filters, so the occupied area and cost can be
significantly reduced. These technologies and equipments have bargained out the obstacles of wide
spread application of DC ice-melting.

• • •

F ay ( 5、
7) F by ( 5、
7) F cy ( 5、
7)

• • •

F ad ( 5、
7) F bd ( 5、
7) F cd ( 5、
7)

Figure 9 The rectifier transformer with 12-pulse

In order to obtain a large current for melting ice and prevent damage to the current imbalances
between the rectifier bridges, large-capacity saturation equilibrium flow reactors have been widely
used. This makes the devices noisy and expensive. Through magnetic circuit simulation and
optimization, we have proposed the “impedance of flow” technique based on discrete optimization
(Figure 10). This method can gain the balance of internal impedance and transformer turns ratio, the
current between the rectifier bridges is less than 5%, and the output current can be up to 12,000A. At
the same time, the harmonic, size, cost and noise can be further reduced.
Ny
Uy
U y = Ud
N y / Nd = 3

k5

Ud f = min ∑ ( N yi / N di − 3 ) 2
i = k1

Nd
z y − zd / [( z y + zd ) / 2] < 2.5%
Figure 10 “Impedance of flow” optimization techniques
According the principles and technologies mentioned above, through heat analysis, reliability
design and extensive testing, we have invented fixed, mobile, portable and other 3 Series 9 models DC
ice-melting equipments (Figure 11) with capacities varying from tens of kilowatts to tens of millions
kilowatts. These equipments could meet the ice-melting requirements of voltage level of 10kV ~
500kV, wires and ground, the main network and agricultural distribution network.

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 (a) 500kV station (b) 220kV Mobile formula (c) portable agricultural distribution network
Figure 11 Series DC ice-melting devices
In 2007, we developed the first DC ice-melting device in China. During the large ice storm in
2008, this device was successfully applied for ice-melting of 110kV Lengkuang line in Loudi city
(Hunan province, China) for the first time. Since 2008, this type of DC ice-melting devices has been
widely used in 1,023 transmission lines of Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan and other provinces in China. These
devices have saved more than RMB6.35 billion in upgrading the line anti-icing standard. Until now,
we have implemented the DC ice-melting for 526 times with a success rate of 100%.
Our ice-melting devices can melt ice in a line of hundreds of kilometers within 90 minutes. The
DC ice-melting device in Yuntian substation 500kV transmission line cost only RMB20 million and
covered an area of less than 1,200 square meters. Our devices are economical, efficient, reliable and
competitive in the international market. We also have developed guidelines for ice-melting of
transmission lines and other technical standards for DC ice-melting. Our devices can highly save the
investment, reduce the occupied area, protect the environment and effectively protect the safe
operation of large power grids.
6 Applications
Chenzhou city, located in Hunan Nanling mountainous region, suffers different grades of power
grid ice disasters every year. In 2008, the icing disaster of this area was the most serious in Southern
China. From January 3rd to 12th, 2013, an icing disaster with the same grade of that in 2008, hit
Chenzhou city. The ice thickness reached up to 40mm (Figure 12).

Figure 12 Icing conditions of Chenzhou city

10 sets of mobile, fixed, portable ice-melting equipments proposed by our research team were
employed for 28 times of ice-melting on Fuwai I line and other lines (Figure 13).

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Figure 13 Ice-melting with our proposed equipments
With applications of our equipments, there was no tower collapse in Chenzhou city. It is verified
that our proposed technologies and equipments are capable of dealing with large-scale severe icing
disasters. In recent years, tower collapse accidents still occur to several transmission lines without
application of our equipments.
7 Conclusions
Icing disasters can be treated as the greatest threat to the safe operation of power grid. In order to
make the power grid more resistant to super icing disasters, our research team has developed a series
of grid anti-icing technologies as follows:
(1) We proposed the “Sun-Earth Atmosphere Coupled” Grid icing rule, and carried out researches
on long, medium and short-term forecast of power grid icing. The research work could win precious
lead time for anti-icing.
(2) The icing monitoring system is designed to adapt to harsh environment. It can realize
automatic identification of ice thickness, and also can provide clear scene of icing conditions.
(3) We developed a series of DC ice-melting equipments with fixtures, small size, low cost, high
reliability, and are easy to operate and maintain. These equipments have been widely applied in China,
saving a lot of investment in upgrading the line anti-icing standard.
(4) The anti-icing composite insulators with large diameter plate and long spaced are invented to
reduce line icing flashover trip rate and improve the reliability of power supply. With these insulators,
the artificial anti-icing on the tower can be avoided.
Series of anti-ice technologies provide systematic, scientific and complete technical support for
power grid. As a result, the resistance of power grid to icing disasters has been significantly enhanced.
With the continuous development of global warming, the frequency of extraordinary weather
disasters is on the rise. A wide range of snow and icing disasters are much likely to happen again.
More attention should be paid to the importance of power grid anti-icing and making further
researches on anti-icing technologies as well as accelerating the extension of scientific and
technological achievements. When severe icing disasters happen again, these technologies can play an
important role in safeguarding normal production and human lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] LU Jiazheng, LIU Chun, CHEN Hongdong, et a1. Finite Element Calculation of 500kV Iced
Power Transmission System. (High Voltage Engineering, 2007, 33(10):167-169.)
[2] LU Jiazheng, JIANG Zhenglong, LEI Hongcai, et al. Analysis of Hunan Power Grid Ice Disaster
Accident in 2008. (Automation of Electric Power Systems, 2008, 32(11): 16-19.)
[3] TANG Jie. Damage Analysis of Icing Disaster in Shaoguan Power Grid in 2008 and
Corresponding Countermeasures. (Guangdong Electric Power, 2009, 22(7),58-61.)
[4] LING Ping, QIAN Zhiyin, ZHAO Wenbin. Research on Icing Disaster Prevention and Treatment
Systems for Transmission Lines in East China. (East China Electric Power, 2008, 36(11),1-5.)
[5] Zhu Youliang, Liang Wen,Yang Jihai et al. Ice Hazard on the Grid Analysis of Disaster and
Emergency Power Grid Construction of the Platform. (Engineering Science, 2010, 15(4), 28-31.)

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[6] LIU Pingyuan, HE Hongming, PAN Chunping. Investigation of Ice Disaster in 2008 and
Research on Deicing in Guangdong Power Grid. (Guangdong Electric Power. 2010, 23(3), 34-
37,44.)
[7] PENG Xiangyang, ZHOU Huamin, PAN Chunping. Damage Condition of Overhead
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