Recently published papers have proven the effectiveness of Electromagnetic time reversal (EMTR) in locating the position of faults such as phase-to-ground shunt connections in power grids. EMTR directly transposes the idea of focusing energy back to its source introduced in original time-reversal methods. The current interpretation of EMTR, based on metrics measuring energy or peak-amplitude of focusing, is shown to suffer from ambiguities that increase the risk of inaccurate fault location. After pointing out under what conditions time-reversal focusing occurs, an original frequency-domain reformulation of EMTR is introduced, showing that EMTR should more accurately be interpreted as a correlation estimator. New metrics based on this observation are introduced, taking into account the inhomogeneous transmission of electrical energy throughout complex networks, enabling a direct quantitative evaluation of the likelihood of locating a fault. Extensive numerical simulations confirm that the proposed formulation systematically improves the reliability of EMTR location estimates when faults occur in power grids of realistic complexity, highlighting the accrued risk that comes with the use of metrics that measure the scale of time-reversal focusing rather than its quality. Index Terms-Fault location, power grids, time reversal. I. INTRODUCTION T HE proper operation of power grids can be severely disrupted by events such as shunt faults where two or more conductors, subject to different potentials, become electrically connected through a low-impedance path, e.g., because of electrical arcs or phase-to-ground faults. The occurrence of such shunt faults is followed by transient signals that can be detected by a monitoring station, or probe, and subsequently used in order to estimate the fault position. A large number of methods has been introduced in the last decades for fault location in power grids, among which those based on travelling waves are of interested in the context of this paper [1]-[4]. A recent proposal for fault location is Electromagnetic Time Reversal (EMTR) [5], which is inspired by the idea of timereversal (TR) focusing [6], [7]. Its main appeal is its ability to locate faults from the transient signals they generate, as measured from a single probe. Its performance has been shown to depend on what kind of metrics are used, e.g., by monitoring S. He and Y. Xie are with