The First Live Working Project on the High-Voltage Grid in The Netherlands

In 2012, the board of the cross-border TSO in the Netherlands and a part of Germany TenneT supplied ‘SHE-Department’ with the task of looking for possibilities to carry out Live working at the high voltage system in the Netherlands. This request was based on the vision that planned outages would be more and more difficult to organize with the increasing inflow of renewables on the grid. After a short assessment, it was obvious that the actual legislation in the Netherlands legally blocked this. This was the starting point of a journey in the Netherlands (that is still going on today). The process of making Live working possible was divided into two workstreams; a short-term focus on carrying out a pilot project including obtaining a temporary dispensation from the labour-law authorities, and a long-term approach to, eventually, change the labor-law