AbstractVarious countermeasures are taken against lightning faults in power transmission lines to decrease their occurrence and improve transmission reliability. However, how much they enhance the power transfer capability has not yet been quantitatively evaluated. The conventional deterministic approach, which is widely used in power system planning methodology, is inadequate to deal with this issue.This paper proposes a new method for numerically defining the power transfer capability enhanced by countermeasures against lightning. The proposed method is based on a probabilistic approach in which several fault patterns are taken into consideration with their occurrence frequency and maximum transferable power. This paper also gives an example application of the proposed method to a model trunk transmission system. The effect of a third overhead ground wire on the increase of transfer capability of a 500 kV transmission line has been quantitatively evaluated.