Optimal design of grounding systems for high voltage substations

Designing grounding systems for high voltage substations has been always considered a serious concern. High losses and costs of performing conventional designs have made researchers think of new substitute plans. The designed system should be able to provide safety for personnel and electrical devices under steady-state operation and transient disturbances. In this paper, a new strategy for designing high voltage substation grounding system is proposed, taking into account relevant IEEE standards. It will be shown that this approach, which is based on CymGrd software package, will have more output parameters that makes the model more efficient, so it can be a sufficient replacement for other conventional methods. One high voltage substation located in northwest Iran is analyzed and then the effectiveness of this method is compared with other methods.