347/600 Volt Arc Flash Mitigation at British Columbia Hydro

British Columbia Hydro (BC Hydro) initially approached an arc flash program development by performing engineering assessments to calculate incident energies across our power system. Due to the complexity of our 347/600 Volt distribution secondary system and the difficulty of determining site-specific details, potential incident energy ranges were determined. Use of the highest incident energy value within the ranges would have resulted in major impacts to our workers (employees and contractors) and customers. Based on this, we worked with our engineering teams to develop arc flash mitigation options that would be less impactful and used a structured decision-making [4] process to engage stakeholders. From this process we identified several options that could reduce the arc flash impact to workers and customers. This paper details how we minimized the arc rated PPE impact to our workers through the development of a 347/600 Volt, arc flash mobile application to calculate site-specific incident energy and the use of temporary insulation to reduce the probability of the arc flash occurring.