The basic characteristics of the current modular fault components are analyzed. According to energy differences of current modular fault components under different fault types, this paper proposes a new fast faulted phase detection method. Taking energy of each modular fault current as character quantity and utilizing their minimum, faulted phase detection is achieved. The principle of this method is reliable, and easy to understand and implement. Simulation results based on PSCAD/EMTDC show that this method can rapidly and accurately identify various fault types on UHV transmission lines. Moreover, this method is almost not affected by sampling frequency, fault inception angle, fault resistance, fault location, etc. So it has a good adaptability.