Windcare has just appointed Aurora to undertake two new earthing studies for a couple of new 500kWe wind turbine sites in the UK. Undertaking these kind of earthing studies is always interesting as small rural substations can often be very challenging sites to design, as they only have limited space to install an earthing grid and the ground conditions can often be poor leading to a high Earth Potential Rise (EPR), which in turn leads to dangerous touch and step voltages.

Earthing studies are one of Aurora’s core competencies and are always interesting to undertake, and seemingly identical sites can often have very different earthing designs depending on their geographical location and the local DNO. For our readers who are interested in understanding more about the challenges of earthing design, please have a look at our presentation ‘Earthing of Rural 11kV and 33kV substations., on our downloads page.