“A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall” Rowlandson (1809)
The power restoration activity now underway in the areas of the US affected by Hurricanes Michael and Florence inspires a revisit of the standard to which public utilities build the overhead and underground power and telecommunication wiring for the communities they serve. We collaborate closely with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee (IEEE E&H) to raise the standard of care for power security on the emergent #SmartCampus. Another IEEE consensus document — IEEE 1366 Guide for Electrical Power Distribution Reliability Indices — is also used by state utility commissions for setting reliability benchmarks. The IEEE E&H Committee tracks campus power outages as a research project.
Several proposals recommending improvements to the 2017 National Electrical Safety Code (NESC) were submitted to the IEEE subcommittees drafting the 2022 revision of the NESC. They are fairly technical and subtle in their implications for the advancement of safety and sustainability in campus power distribution systems. Some of the proposals deal with coordination with the National Electrical Code — which is now deep in 2020 revision cycle
Keep in mind that that NESC is revised every 5 years at the moment. The next steps in the 2022 NESC development will span across most of the next 12 months as the various subcommittees meet a prepare written response to public input and release those responses no later than July 1, 2019. The complete schedule is linked below:
IEEE C2 National Electrical Safety Code 2022 Revision Schedule
Comments are due March 1, 2020.
The subcommittee that coordinates standards action between the IEEE and NFPA suite of technical standards — IEEE Standards Coordinating Committee 18 — will also be hosting worksessions in the coming months. While those work sessions are generally closed to the public, some of the concepts will be open for discussion during any of the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities online committee meetings which meets 4 times monthly in Europe and the Americas.
Business unit leaders, facility managers and electrical engineers working in the education facilities industry may be interested in the campus power system reliability database. Forced outages in on large research campuses, for example, can have enterprise interruption cost of $100,000 to $1,000,000 per minute. The database discriminates between forced outages attributed to public utility interruptions and forced outages attributed to the university-owned power system. The E&H committee will convey some of the discipline applied by the IEEE 1366 technical committee into its study of campus power systems; many of which are larger than publicly owned or cooperative utilities.
Issue: [16-67]
Contact: Mike Anthony, Robert G. Arno, Lorne Clark, Nehad El-Sharif, Jim Harvey, Kane Howard, Joe Weber, Guiseppe Parise, Jim Murphy
Category: Electrical, Energy Conservation & Management, Occupational Safety
LEARN MORE:
P1366 – Guide for Electric Power Distribution Reliability Indices
Posted July 12
With the balloting of the First Draft of the 2020 National Electrical Code (the NEC, a consensus document developed by the National Fire Protection Association) now completed, we turn our attention to the 2022 revision of the National Electrical Safety Code (te NESC, a consensus document developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers).*
We collaborate with the IEEE SCC-18 and the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee in developing safety and sustainability concepts unique to educational facilities — particularly the campuses of large research universities where the power systems are on the order of 25 to 250 connected MVA. Power systems this large are unregulated by public service commissions because they are considered premises wiring by the NEC and considered to be on the customer side of the point of common coupling by investor-owned utilities who are. Coupled with the NEC, the NESC sets the standard of care for all exterior campus power system design, construction and maintenance.
Public input is due July 16, 2018. All IEEE consensus documents are on the standing agenda of our weekly Open Door teleconference — every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Eastern time. Click here to log in. The next teleconference of the E&H committee is scheduled for June 9th. Anyone is welcomed to join either of the two teleconferences hosted bi-weekly during the business day of Europe (15:00 – 15:30) and the Americas (3:00 – 3:30 PM EDT) with the login information on the IEEE E&H website: http://sites.ieee.org/icps-ehe/
Issue: [16-67]
Contact: Mike Anthony, Robert G. Arno, Lorne Clark, Nehad El-Sharif, Jim Harvey, Kane Howard, Joe Weber, Guiseppe Parise, Jim Murphy
Category: Electrical, Energy Conservation & Management, Occupational Safety
Walla Walla University
*The NFPA is an organization with fire safety as a primary consideration. The IEEE is an organization with the safety and sustainability of electrotechnology as a primary consideration. These are two different complementary but oftentimes competing cultures with respect to sustaining the business model of an accredited consensus standards developer.