Aiming at the problems of multiple faults and poor location accuracy of hybrid transmission lines a fault location method based on improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise CEEMDAN and Teager-Kaiser energy operator was proposed. Firstly the fault voltage signals of transmission lines were decoupled by a new phase-mode transformation to eliminate the electromagnetic coupling phenomenon between lines. Then the decoupled fault voltage signal was decomposed by using the improved CEEMDAN and Teager-Kaiser energy operator and the time when the initial traveling wave of the fault reached the detection point was extracted. According to the fault characteristics of the zero-mode and line-mode components of the transient voltage traveling wave a fault branch discrimination method based on the time difference between zero-mode and line-mode was proposed. Finally in order to solve the problem that the accurate value of the traveling wave velocity can not be obtained the accurate fault location data were obtained by using the traveling wave ranging method based on the time difference between zero-mode and line-mode. Based on the simulation model the improved CEEMDAN algorithm was compared with the traditional CEEMDAN algorithm and the effectiveness of the proposed improved algorithm was verified. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is not affected by fault type transition resistance wave velocity and time synchronization and has a high measurement accuracy. The improved CEEMDAN algorithm can effectively improve the randomness problem caused by the decomposition of fault signals by the traditional CEEMDAN algorithm which has high engineering application value.