Hello!
I don't know what this "lightening suppression system" means.
Talking about lighting protection is a lot like talking politics, you can spend the entire day yacking about it, but you don't know whats really right until after the fact.
I don't know how one could suppress lighting. You can work towards avoiding it, or reducing it's effect when it hits.
My opinion is that dealing with lighting is exactly like Catch 22.
Everyone says (me too) that the answer is grounding, and lots of it.
The problem is, the more you ground the more you're reaching out to the Big Guy upstairs with a sign saying "Strike Here".
Lighting seeks ground, and the "higher the quality" the better.
I have never worked on or around a tower with a wind turbine on it, but I have worked with a number of antenna towers.
Lighting protection is all about protecting the "equipment" in the "shack" and not so much the tower it's self.
We all know that a bolt of lighting is a HUGE amount of power, and for a very short period of time. The only way (to my knowledge) to deal with this energy is to disperse it into the ground.
I installed and serviced lots (hundreds) of TV antennas mounted on roof tops. In the years I did that on two occasions I saw the results of a direct strike on the antennas. Both cases the ground cable that connected the antenna tripod to a driven ground rod had been vaporized. The 300 ohm twin lead was a melted mess and the TV's were "toast". The 16 - 12 gauge ground wire opened like a 1/2 amp fuse.
If your tower gets hit by lighting, and it wasn't grounded (per code) your insurance company will tell you... "too bad, so sad".
but at the same time, grounding it is just inviting a strike. catch 22
Chris wrote.. Actually, his exact words were, "Did you get a good deal on ground rods someplace, Chris, and just decide to buy a truckload of 'em?"
These would be a good beginning to grounding your tower.. if you can pull some of them out of the ground and drive them near your tower and use some VERY heavy copper wire from (4 or 0?) to tie your tower to the ground rods. It would help if these ground rods made contact with the water table.
It's kinda funny, but in many rural homes that get struck by lighting, most will suffer burnt out submerged well pumps, and not their TVs and radios. Lighting loves a good ground!
ax7
Mark
Lighting protection, Damned if you do, damned if you don't.