AbstractThe paper deals with the topic of utility power quality improvement by short‐circuit current limitation. A novel double‐tuned medium‐voltage (MV) fault‐current limiter (FCL), whose operation shows several interesting characteristics, is analyzed and discussed in the paper. A special property of this kind of FCL is the capability to quickly change its configuration in case of short circuit by either a back‐to‐back thyristor switch or a ZnO varistor. The latter solution is very attractive since it allows a significant simplification in the limiter hardware, that, in such a case, does not require any power electronic component. The above solutions are studied and compared, also through relevant computer simulation.