Transmission and Distribution Program -

Course Offerings

Students will learn how to plan and implement transmission and distribution projects from industry leaders. From costing a project to dealing with land right-of-ways, students will develop the skills necessary for transmission and distribution work. See course descriptions below.

Power related courses at four-year university engineering programs are typically offered in the electrical engineering area and can be characterized as an extension of electric circuit modeling.  Course topics generally include power systems analysis, analysis of faulted power systems, machine theory, and high voltage engineering.  All rely heavily on classic circuit theory modeling to develop electrical engineering concepts applicable to generation, transmission, and distribution systems.  At this time virtually no program in the country offers a mixture of engineering practicum (industry practice) along with conventional academic instruction at either undergraduate or graduate level.

To fill this void, several consultants and institutions offer short training seminars to provide exposure on focused topics related to the energy sector. Such programs are generally offered as three to five day compressed courses that do not provide adequate time for homework assignments, testing, or project exercises to help students fully understand the subject matter under consideration.

To overcome these known drawbacks the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Gonzaga University is developing a multi-disciplined Transmission and Distribution (T&D) Certificate program. Strategically designed to train and educate engineers that are fully capable of designing and constructing the nation’s future electrical power grid, the program blends academic rigor with engineering practicum in a series of five, three-credit hour courses that form the basis of a T&D Certificate. Each course incorporates aspects of civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering disciplines typically used in modern electrical grid design.

The courses are, therefore, appropriate for graduate engineers and senior engineering undergraduates with an interest in designing the power transmission grid of the future. With leading industry experts responsible for both developing course content and actual course delivery, the program has a potential of playing a leading role in training our next generation of power industry engineers.  

Course Descriptions:

TADP 540 Transmission Line Design - Introduction: Structures, foundation design, conductors, survey techniques, terrain modeling, computer-aided design, NESC code requirements. Students will design sag and tension template by hand and spot a new transmission line.

TADP 541 Electrical Distribution System Design: Distribution System concepts, line and substation design, network planning, conductor sizing, transformer specification & connections, arrestors, underground cabling, substation overview, protection/fusing. Short circuit, load flow, reactive compensation and harmonic analysis. Integration of renewable and distributed generation into the grid.

TADP 542 Substation Design:  System overview, design principles, types of substations, components, utilization, scoping a project, project plan, site, scheduling, major equipment, control houses.

TADP 543 Electrical Grid Operations:  NERC/WECC reliability standards, control area operation, outage coordination planning, switch theory and devices, reactive load balancing, generation load balancing, per-unit system, network modeling, power flow analysis, system disturbance analysis, and seasonal ratings.

TADP 544 Project Development and Construction Methods:  Project development, project proposals to management, project initiation, scheduling, cost management, resource management, permitting authority, land rights acquisition, overview of contracts, contractor selection, and project status tracking.

TADP 545 System Protection: General concepts, voltage and current transformers for protection, classification and functionality of relays, overcurrent protection, distribution feeder protection, high voltage line protection with distance relaying, transformer protection, generator protection, testing and commissioning.

TADP 548 Electrical Aspects of Transmission Line Design:  Introduction to Electrical Aspects, rules and requirements, design criteria & voltage levels, conductor selection & ratings, clearances, REA manual, insulation, voltage flashover, EMF fields, corona, induction coordination, grounding requirements, pole grounding,  guy wire grounding, grounding measurements.

TADP 553 System Automation: Economic benefits, reliability, safety, equipment costs, communication, transmission automation, distribution automation, under frequency load shedding, radial overhead, radial loop underground, demand side management, remote connect/disconnect, SmartGrid, consumer automation, network design aspects.

TADP 640 Transmission Line Design - Advanced:  Guyed structures, lattice towers, steel poles, soil properties & foundations under compression, foundations under lateral load, foundations under uplift, advanced sag and tension, special problems in sag and tension, LiDAR technology.

TADP 641  Power System Analysis: Power system modeling, short circuit calculations, load flow algorithms and methods, and harmonic analysis and filter design. Case studies on voltage regulation, VAR control, and relay setting and coordination. Basic concepts of power systems, their components and how they are inter-related. Overview to the topology and players of the North American power grid.