About CIGRE Canada 2026

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Ampacimon will be exhibiting at CIGRE Canada 2026, held this year as the CIGRE Energy Forum, in Calgary from September 21 to 24, where we'll be showing how Dynamic Line Rating (DLR) unlocks capacity on existing transmission corridors. This year's theme is"Grid Modernization: Enabling Large Loads, Advanced Storage, and Smart Technologies for a Secure and Resilient Energy Future," and the program brings together more than 900 delegates, 115+ exhibiting companies and over 400 paper presentations across technical sessions, panels and workshops.

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Grid-enhancing technologies are one of the five areas the forum is built around. As utilities absorb large new loads and connect more renewable generation, unlocking capacity on existing corridors is often faster and cheaper than building new ones, and that's the conversation we're bringing to Calgary.

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GridBoost®, our DLR platform, at booth 413

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GridBoost® is the platform our Dynamic Line Rating solutions run on. Rather than one method applied everywhere, it hosts three rating strategies that can be deployed on their own or combined across the same network:

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• Sensor-based DLR measures sag and wind in real time from sensors mounted directly on the conductor, delivering up to 40% additional capacity compared with static ratings. The measurement method is patented: sag is derived from the low-frequency mechanical vibrations caused by wind and thermal convection, so no calibration, no conductor data and no tower-mounted weather stations are needed. Installation can be done by drone, on live lines, without an outage.
• OPGW-based DLR measures wind along every span of a route through the existing optical ground wire, with no hardware on the conductor.
• Sensorless DLR covers lines with no measurement hardware installed, using weather data alone to produce ambient-adjusted ratings (AAR) at low cost across a wide portion of the network.

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On top of whichever strategy you choose, the platform provides rating forecasts up to 10 days ahead and integration into EMS, SCADA and market processes.

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The combination is what makes a grid-wide rollout realistic rather than a line-by-line project: direct measurement where clearance is critical, distributed measurement across full routes, ambient-adjusted ratings everywhere else. Stop by booth 413 and we'll go through which mix fits your network.

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Introducing OPGW-based Dynamic Line Rating

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OPGW-based DLR is the most recent addition to our range, developed with AP Sensing. Nearly every transmission line on your network already carries an optical ground wire, and we use it as a measurement instrument: a single DAS interrogator installed at substation level reads the fiber already strung across your towers and measures the wind acting on the line, span by span, along up to 2 x 100 km per unit. Nothing is added to the conductor, there's no outage, and no weather station or specialist training is required.

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Those readings are converted into a deterministic, physics-based rating for every span and delivered to the control room every five minutes. Because the rating comes from measured wind rather than a model of it, the result is auditable, which matters when ratings feed real-time and market operations.

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Where the limiting spans actually sit is normally worked out up front, from modeling and site knowledge. Continuous measurement across the full route confirms it with field data, and reveals the spans that are only marginally less constrained, the ones that become limiting as soon as conditions change.

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That's whole-line visibility from one installation. On the spans where clearance is the binding constraint and you want sag measured directly, conductor sensors slot in on the same platform, so the two run as one rating strategy rather than two projects.

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We'll be presenting the field validation for this in Calgary: a 220 kV line in Luxembourg, wind derived from the fiber checked span by span against a conductor-mounted sensor.

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Explore OPGW-based DLR

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Two technical papers in Study Committee B2

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We're presenting two papers in Calgary, both in B2 Overhead Lines, session 2: Grid-Enhancing Techniques and Technologies. One comes out of a field deployment with a European TSO, the other out of laboratory validation work.

Optical Ground Wired (OPGW) and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) based monitoring of overhead lines (paper 10126)

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Co-authored with Creos and AP Sensing. Over the June 2025 analysis period, the standard deviation of the absolute wind speed difference between the DAS-derived wind and the reference sensor was around 0.4 m/s, on a span located in open terrain. The paper details how DAS readings are converted to wind at OPGW height and extrapolated down to phase-conductor height, how span-by-span data identifies critical and near-critical spans from field measurements rather than modeling assumptions, and what the extrapolation costs in accuracy over more complex terrain. The reference sensor was installed by drone on the lowest phase.

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Travelling wave-based method and device to monitor vibration severity in overhead power lines (paper 10121)

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Aeolian vibrations drive fatigue failure at suspension clamps, dampers and fittings, but measuring the relevant indicators in the field is notoriously difficult. This paper presents a patented traveling wave method that combines accelerometer and gyroscope readings from a single inertial measurement unit to estimate free-loop antinode amplitude, and therefore the fYmax fatigue indicator, independently of where the sensor sits along the span. The method was validated at the Cable Dynamics Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano on a 45.5 m span with a 31.5 mm AAAC conductor, across more than 45 tests covering frequencies from roughly 8 Hz to 43 Hz.

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Following on from Montreal

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Calgary continues a conversation we started at the CIGRE 2025 International Symposium in Montreal, where we presented a scalable method for forecasting wind and dynamic line ratings using regional machine learning models trained on multiple sensor-equipped spans. The through-line is the same: give utilities more of the grid's real behavior, on more spans, without putting a sensor on every one.

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Let's meet in Calgary

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Booth 413, September 21–24, TELUS Convention Centre.

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Contact us for more information or to book a meeting.