It is well known that the lightning protection of transmission lines is exclusively relying on their correct initial design. Although detailed engineering studies are usually performed by electric power utilities for the design of new transmission lines, there are reported cases where the design is based simply on tradition or on utilities' standardization policy. In this paper, the lightning protection of high-voltage transmission lines is faced as an optimization problem where optimum design parameters are calculated for the lines, relating their cost with the lightning failures' cost, aiming to reduce or even eliminate lightning failures. The optimization method considers all the available protection means, i.e. ground wires and surge arresters. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied on several operating Hellenic transmission lines of 150 kV carefully selected among others due to their high failure rates during lightning thunderstorms. The obtained optimum parameters, which reduce the failure rates caused by lightning are compared with the operating transmission lines' existing parameters showing the usefulness of the method, which can prove to be a valuable tool for the studies of electric power system designers. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.