Design of a Low Resistance Grounding System for a Hydro-Electric Plant Located on Highly Resistive Soils

A design procedure to achieve a reasonably low grounding resistance for a hydro-electric generation and transmission complex & situated on extremely resistive rock-bed terrains is presented. Advantage is taken of nearby available volumes of water and low resistivity soils to decrease the otherwise high resistance to ground of the plant. The paper gives a description of the grid being used, together with possible methods of calculation for the various parts of the grounding network, taking into account the existence of multi-layer grounding paths. Though, there have been several papers written on theoretical methods for various electrode configurations, there is very little literature available dealing with such a specific application and related calculation.