Avoiding costly plant shutdowns by employing specialized live technologies and safe practices

The paper illustrates the increased popularity of live work through examples of work performed. It also highlights the unique capability of saving utilities costly plant shutdowns through the use of patented live-line technologies and safe work practices. Advances in the supporting technologies and an increased focus on safety has led to the efficiency increases in live work projects, with no service disruption as opposed to deadline working with associated network downtime. Idealistically, with continued advances in the supporting technologies and safety as a primary concern, one could visualize live work being the preferred means of intervention, when line faults occur or when infrastructure upgrades are contemplated. The paper showcases technologies utilized on HV circuits. Actual projects undertook are referenced, highlighting the advantages of the application of these technologies. Advances in the techniques for bare-hand work are referred to by application. Maintaining high safety standards, whilst making small ad-hoc changes (on a per-project basis) in techniques has lead to maturity in this field of expertise.