Includes bibliographical references.A country's ability to sustain and grow its industrial and commercial activities is highly dependent on a reliable electricity supply. Electrical faults on transmission lines are a cause of both interruptions to supply and voltage dips. These are the most common events impacting electricity users and also have the largest financial impact on them. This research focuses on understanding the causes of transmission line faults and developing methods to automatically identify these causes. Records of faults occurring on the South African power transmission system over a 16-year period have been collected and analysed to find statistical relationships between local climate, key design parameters of the overhead lines and the main causes of power system faults. The results characterize the performance of the South African transmission system on a probabilistic basis and illustrate differences in fault cause statistics for the summer and winter rainfall areas of South Africa and for different times of the year and day. This analysis lays a foundation for reliability analysis and fault pattern recognition taking environmental features such as local geography, climate and power system parameters into account. A key aspect of using pattern recognition techniques is selecting appropriate classifying features. Transmission line fault waveforms are characterised by instantaneous symmetrical component analysis to describe the transient and steady state fault conditions. The waveform and environmental features are used to develop single nearest neighbour classifiers to identify the underlying cause of transmission line faults. A classification accuracy of 86% is achieved using a single nearest neighbour classifier. This classification performance is found to be superior to that of decision tree, artificial neural network and naïve Bayes classifiers. The results achieved demonstrate that transmission line faults can be automatically classified according to cause
