The cost effective lightning protection for live line workers

In the last years economic, technical and competitive constraints (based upon cost/benefit analysis) have influenced positively the interest in live working in most European countries. This is characterised not only by the grown acceptance and application of working at electrical medium voltage installations, but also by the positive development of basic conditions. However work on energized power equipment has to be limited in case of unfavourable environment conditions. According to the standards if any of the workers can see lightning or hear thunder everybody has to stop working if the team works on overhead lines or equipment of electric station that are interconnected to those lines. In these cases the operation is not allowed or has to be finished as soon as possible. The level of protection is usually not suitable if using primary and/or secondary lightning protection on the aforesaid basis. Recent work of the authors in lightning protection resulted in a new method, namely the preventive lightning protection. This method uses preventive measures applied only for the duration of the thunderstorms. One of the specific uses of preventive lightning protection is live line maintenance. The paper focuses on introducing the practical use of preventive lightning protection in live line maintenance and its cost effectiveness is show, too..