New bank is born Berkshire Bank and Brookline Bank plan a $1.1 billion “merger of equals.” What will the future hold? Pages 2-4
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Berkshire Business Journal JANUARY 2025 I VOL. 4, NO. 1
Lightning in a lab
PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE ZOLLSHAN
The mechanisms inside EPRI’s largest impulse generator can create a 5.6 megavolt charge to simulate a powerful lightning strike.
High-voltage test facility aims to fortify the power grid BY MATT MARTINEZ The Berkshire Eagle LENOX — They say lightning never strikes
the same place twice. At the Electric Power Research Institute’s Transmission and Distribution Laboratory, lightning strikes as many times as it likes — just not in bolts, per se. For the electrical engineers working at EPRI, conjuring electric surges to rival a summer storm is a routine matter. The 37-acre compound is home to three “impulse generators” — imposing structures that can generate high-voltage surges at will. The tallest is a massive green polygon similar in size to a grain elevator, housing 56 capacitors aligned on top of each other and capable of generating up to 5.3 megavolts. One megavolt — a unit of electric potential equal to 1 million volts — is enough to power 8,000 household outlets. Researchers use that power to simulate a strike of lightning on a power transmission line or conductor, explained Andrew Phillips, vice president of transmission and distribution in-
frastructure for EPRI. The simulation comes in handy for utility companies when testing the durability of equipment against power surges in the field. That’s one of more than 100 tests taking place at the facility, Phillips said. Many of the other tests have a similar goal: To maximize the safety and efficacy of our nation’s power grid and to gird it to withstand environmental threats. The EPRI laboratory, located at 115 East New Lenox Road, can simulate a variety of situations. At one corner of the laboratory grounds, a levered pole is rigged strategically to bludgeon a set of power lines, simulating the impact of a fallen tree. In another, a group of composite insulators — vital equipment for controlling the flow of current in an electric circuit — is battered with rain, salt and ultraviolet light in a “rapid aging chamber” that can simulate a decade’s worth of wear in a single year.
The goal there is to see how long the composite insulators hold up — some have lasted up to 70 years, Phillips said. The durability of composite insulators has increased thanks to improvements made by manufacturers based on the research. When such tests first started in the 1990s, most composite insulators didn’t last more than two years in the chamber. That’s a fraction of the work that goes on at the Lenox laboratory, which is in a class of its own among its contemporaries, according to Phillips. He would know. In the same way devoted baseball fans make pilgrimages to baseball parks, Phillips visits the best high-voltage labs in the world. “There’s no lab that does what this does in the U.S.,” Phillips said. “And there’s really maybe two other ones in the world that do what this does.” EPRI, Page 9
Inside the multistress aging chamber at EPRI’s Lenox lab, electrical insulators undergo an accelerated rate of aging due to environmental factors; including UV radiation, rain spray, mist, varying temperatures, salt fog and humidity.