Section 2 — Automatic protection — Balanced relays and flashover control

Throughout the history of the Big Creek transmission line there have been flashovers which would occur occasionally at no particular interval and at no particular season of the year or time of day. This was the case when operating at both 150 kv. and 220 kv. These flashovers would occur in the proximity of an insulator string, would result in grounding one of the wires and would cause an interruption to the service. The operators became expert in handling these flashovers with the original installation of two units in each Big Creek No. 1 and Big Creek No. 2 and the synchronous condensers in Eagle Rock and the interruption resulting from a flashover was very short. When the system became more complicated by the addition of the frequency changer and the Kern River No. 3 connection at Vestal, with more generating stations at Big Creek, the manual control of flashovers did not give such good results. The procedure under manual operation was as follows: