New IEEE standard for Selection of Insulators with Respect to Cold Weather Conditions has been published after 10 years of work

The IEEE Standards Association, the Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS) and the Power and Energy Society (PES) has acknowledged the contributions of Igor Gutman to the IEEE Standard 1820 over its ten-year development period.

Andy Schwalm helped to get the document through to Draft 4 as Vice Chair, with Bill Chisholm of Kinectrics taking over at Draft 5 and leading the job to completion. The group of contributors presented below is impressive. One measure of success of the standard is that 56 reviewers returned re-circulation ballots with 100% approval rate!

The beauty of the standard is that an overall design goal is to select insulator dimensions that provide a specific level of reliability. For transmission lines, this is expressed as a predicted fault rate, in outages per 100 km of line circuit length per year. For stations, the reliability is expressed as a mean time between failures (MTBF) in years. The approach is valid for failures due to lightning, switching, contamination, and icing.

By the detailed presentation of this approach,  the new standard can be considered as one step ahead of the IEC standards 60815 (parts 1-4). Although  the statistical method for insulation selection under contamination is included also in the IEC standards, it does not reach the same level as presented in the new IEEE standard.