CALAJOULE: An Italian Research to Lessen Joule Power Losses in Overhead Lines by Means of Innovative Conductors

The ongoing evolution of the power system to implement climate action policies is resulting in a continuous increase in the penetration of renewables and the necessity of strengthening the transmission grid to optimize the usage of those sources and contain operation costs. Reinforcing the transmission lines or building new ones is a process that is made difficult due to authorization issues related with environmental and public acceptance concerns. Developing innovative conductors for overhead lines with enhanced performances with respect to the traditional ones would bring benefits in terms of energy efficiency increases in transmission and distribution grids without requiring the substitution of the existing towers. The project CALAJOULE (the genesis of the acronym comes from the union of the Italian verb “calare”-to decrease-to the third person singular, namely “cala” i.e., decreases, and of Joule, obvious reference to the active losses), cofinanced by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development in the framework of the “Ricerca di Sistema” program, aims at proposing innovative solutions for overhead line conductors for the containment of Joule power losses. In this paper, starting from the state-of-the-art of the currently adopted conductors, the main innovative solutions resulting from the project are presented and compared with the traditional ones to evaluate the achievable reduction in Joule losses.