Can Your Power Line Tell You Who Started the Fire?

In recent wildfire claims involving power infrastructure, one question keeps coming up: Did the transmission line start the fire, or did the fire take out the line?

Until now, utilities and insurers alike have had to rely on forensic reports, thermal camera flyovers, and often inconclusive evidence. But a new class of transmission and distribution line monitoring system—already deployed across over 1 million km of live power lines—offers a different approach.

What Is It?

The system is called SP3000, and it monitors overhead and cable lines using clamp-on terminals that detect:

• Traveling waves triggered by faults
• Current and temperature changes
• Corona discharges and smoke (for early fire threat detection)
• Direction of current flow, helping distinguish load vs. source issues

It’s made by a manufacturer with a strong record in large-scale grid applications and international deployments in Southeast Asia and beyond. I recently had a technical walkthrough of the system’s capabilities—and came away impressed by both its fault localization accuracy and its early warning functions.

How It Works

The SP3000 system consists of:

• Monitoring Terminals – clamp-on sensors installed every 20–30 km for overhead lines, or 8–10 km for cable
• Data Center Platform – cloud or locally hosted, receiving real-time alerts
• Analytics Engine – calculates exact fault location based on wave propagation and current change analysis

Key feature: it can detect and time-stamp traveling waves—the high-speed signal emitted during fault inception—and use this to locate the fault to within 200 meters (OH) or <0.2% of line length (UG).

What Sets It Apart?

Early Warning Capability

• Detects hidden faults, corona, overheating, and insulation breakdown before failure occurs
• Sends alerts via web, SMS, or email

Fault Cause ID

• Distinguishes lightning faults from mechanical or electrical causes
• 95%+ accuracy for lightning; 90%+ for other faults

Current Direction Detection

• Can detect power flow reversals, useful for:

Simple Deployment

• Clamp-on, solar-powered sensors
• No CTs or complex cabling
• Works in extreme weather, altitude, salt-fog, or desert conditions

Why This Matters for Utilities

• Faster fault recovery – interval and pinpoint location guidance
• Improved wildfire risk mitigation – detects corona or overheating before failure
• Post-event forensics – distinguishes between cause and effect in line-related fire cases
• Supports mixed line types – overhead, underground, or hybrid

Why This Matters for Insurers

For insurers, especially those underwriting wildfire-prone infrastructure, SP3000 offers a new form of risk control:

• Better attribution: Determines if line caused fire or fire caused line failure
• Faster claims resolution: Removes ambiguity from fire origin and line performance
• Potential risk score improvement: Could be recognized as a mitigation control in MFL scenarios

What About Data Security?

The system requires only basic operational inputs (line length, voltage, tower maps) and offers multiple deployment models, including:

• Fully local processing (no external cloud dependency)
• Encrypted wireless transmission (cellular, Wi-Fi, fiber)
• Open architecture for integration into SCADA or other EMS platforms

If your organization has strict data governance or NERC-CIP obligations, the manufacturer claims they can accommodate local-only deployments.

Real-World Applications

• Malaysia: Used to identify lightning-prone segments of the transmission system
• Laos: Reduced outage troubleshooting from hours to minutes
• Wind Farm Case: Detected wind-induced fault that was missed after $10M in tower upgrades
• Cable Fault Case: Located a sub-surface insulation failure invisible to visual inspection

Final Thoughts

If you work in utility risk engineering, asset protection, or wildfire loss prevention, this is a system worth knowing about.

⚠️ No, I’m not endorsing or reselling anything. I just believe that if a system can tell you whether your infrastructure caused a disaster—or was the victim of one, it deserves a seat at the table.

Want to learn more or speak with the manufacturer? Drop me a note and I’ll be glad to connect you.