Saving India’s transmission network lines

Transmission lines links the node centres of the country’s generation sector to the end user. The failure of any line would have much worse of an effect. So, here is a special report on how imperative it is to implement an emergency restoration system to save the day.

Emergency Restoration plan in terms of transmission tower will include the complete project planning from the day of enquiry until the line is charged. The first point of action will be to make a site visit by the survey team of Supreme to examine the site condition. Clearance between the existing tower & ERS, span length, possibility of ROW issues needs to be considered while making the survey. This will be followed by dispatching the materials and labours to the site and begin the erection works.

If ERS is used for re-conductoring works, a shutdown will be required for bypassing the main line to the ERS. Once the ERS line is charged, they will be under constant monitoring. After restoring the main line, the bypassed line will be shifted to the main line and the ERS towers will be disassembled.

Limiting the cost and duration of power outages in transmission lines
It takes months to restore a damaged tower back to its original state. Without using
ERS towers, the transmission line utilities will incur a severe financial loss due to the non-availability of their lines.

Few years back, in case of major tower failure, large utilities in India imported and trained their team for erecting these structures. Further, small utilities and transmission companies were unable to offer such high capex for importing and maintaining a team for these ERS towers. In order to make it available for the Indian utilities, we designed, tested and manufactured the ERS tower. We have 50-member team available with us who are trained and can make the erection of ERS tower. They are fully capable of erecting a 36m tower within a couple of hours. We offer a complete end to end solution where we handle the transportation, erection, supervision and disassembling of the structure. This has not only cut the capital cost for importing the tower but also saves the O&M, training and storage cost that are incurred by the customer in case they own the system.

Successful restorations
During the erection time of our first project, our team took a day for erecting a single tower. We made changes to the erection process and by the time we started doing our third project, we were fully capable of erecting a 36m tower in a matter of hours without the need of any heavy equipments. The major takeaway lesson was from the last project that we did in Eastern India where we erected a tower in middle of a river where there is no proper soil for anchoring the tower. As the accessibility to the site was only by country boats, we designed and made portable bases which acted as a deadweight for anchoring. Prior to this, the most crucial limit on using the ERS structures is that there should be a proper soil for anchoring the structures. With the advent of these modular base, we have taken out one of the major constraints on erecting the ERS towers (i.e) a proper soil for anchoring and there is now no such terrain limit for ERS.

Authored by,
Harish Agarwal, CEO, Supreme & Co Pvt ltd