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Guide to California Lighting Regulations: Title 20
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Interconnected Electric Power Production Sources “Microgrids”
“Landscape with a Farm House and Windmill” (1680) / Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael
We have always taken a forward-looking approach to the National Electrical Code (NEC) because there is sufficient supply of NEC instructors and inspectors and not enough subject matter experts driving user-interest ideas into it. Today we approach the parts of the 2023 NEC that cover wiring safety for microgrid systems; a relatively new term of art that appropriates safety and sustainability concepts that have existed in electrotechnology energy systems for decades.
Turn to Part II of Article 705 Interconnected Electric Power Production Sources:
Free Access 2023 National Electrical Code
You will notice that microgrid wiring safety is a relatively small part of the much larger Article 705 Content. There were relatively minor changes to the 2017 NEC in Section 705.50 — but a great deal of new content regarding Microgrid Interconnection Devices, load side connections, backfeeding practice and disconnecting means — as can be seen in the transcripts of Code-Making Panel 4 action last cycle:
Code‐Making Panel 4 Public Input Report (692 Pages)
Code-Making Panel 4 Public Comment Report (352 Pages)
Keep in mind that the NEC says nothing (or nearly very little, in its purpose stated in Section 90.2) about microgrid economics or the life cycle cost of any other electrical installation. It is the claim about economic advantages of microgrids that drive education facility asset management and energy conservation units to conceive, finance, install, operate and — most of all — tell the world about them.
In previous posts we have done our level best to reduce the expectations of business and finance leaders of dramatic net energy savings with microgrids — especially on campuses with district energy systems. Microgrids do, however, provide a power security advantage during major regional contingencies — but that advantage involves a different set of numbers.
Note also that there is no user-interest from the education facility industry — the largest non-residential building construction market in the the United States — on Panel 4. This is not the fault of the NFPA, as we explain in our ABOUT.
The 2023 NEC was released late last year.
The 2026 revision cycle is in full swing with public comment on the First Draft receivable until August 24, 2024. Let’s start formulating our ideas using the 2023 CMP-4 transcripts. The link below contains a record of work on the 2023 NEC:
We collaborate with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facility Committee which meets online 4 times per month in European and American time zones. Since a great deal of the technical basis for the NEC originates with the IEEE we will also collaborate with other IEEE professional societies.
Mike Anthony’s father-in-law and son maintaining the electrical interactive system installed in the windmill that provides electricity to drive a pump that keeps the canal water at an appropriate level on the family farm near Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.
Issue: [19-151]
Category: Electrical, Energy
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey, Kane Howard, Jose Meijer
“Backup” Power Systems
Image Credit: Unknown
We use the term “backup” power system to convey the complexity of electrical power sources when the primary source is not used; either as a scheduled or an unscheduled event. Best practice literature in this domain has been relatively stable, even though challenged by newer primary source of power technologies. We are running our daily colloquium in parallel with the recurring 4 times monthly meetings of the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee. You are welcomed to join us with the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
Baseball Lighting
Baseball is a pastoral game and lighting changed the experience of it. Since a baseball is less than 3-inches in diameter and routinely travels 400 feet at 100 miles per hour, illumination design must have outfielders in mind as well as other players and spectators.
FINALS MATCHUP SECURED 🤩
🖥️ https://t.co/vUbrNtVRPX
🎟️ https://t.co/i73Q25MuVk
📲 https://t.co/D9Ga3efNbI#MCWS pic.twitter.com/uO82Jy8d7x— NCAA Baseball (@NCAABaseball) June 19, 2025
“Baseball at Night” | Morris Kantor (1934)
“Baseball is ninety percent mental
and the other half is physical.”
– Yogi Berra
After athletic facility life safety obligations are met (governed legally by NFPA 70, NFPA 101, NFPA 110, the International Building Code and possibly other state adaptations of those consensus documents incorporated by reference into public safety law) business objective standards may come into play. For business purposes, the documents distributed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association inform the standard of care for individual athletic arenas so that swiftly moving media production companies have some consistency in power sources and illumination as they move from site to site. Sometimes concepts to meet both life safety and business objectives merge.
During the spring baseball season the document linked below provides guidance for illumination designers, contractors and facility managers:
Athletic programs are a significant source of revenue and form a large part of the foundation of the brand identity of most educational institutions in the United States. We focus primarily upon the technology standards that govern the safety, performance and sustainability of these enterprises. We cover the objectives of the energy conservation advocates in separate posts; notably advocates using the International Code Council and the ASHRAE suite to advance their agenda to press boxes and the entire baseball experience (interior and exterior) site in separate posts.
We collaborate very closely with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee where subject matter experts in electrical power systems meet 4 times each month in the Americas and Europe.
See our CALENDAR for our next Sport colloquium. We typically walk through the safety and sustainability concepts in play; identify commenting opportunities; and find user-interest “champions” on the technical committees who have a similar goal in lowering #TotalCostofOwnership.
Issue: [15-138]*
Category: Electrical, Energy Conservation, Energy, Athletics & Recreation
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey, Jose Meijer, Scott Gibbs, George Reiher
More
Comparison of MH and LED performance for sport lighting application
A novel smart energy management system in sports stadiums
Tracking pitches for broadcast television
Emergency & Standby Power Systems
FREE ACCESS: 2025 Standard for Emergency and Standby Power Systems
Public Input for 2028 Revision Received Until June 4, 2025
Academy of Art University | San Francisco County
Elevators rely on electricity to function, and when there’s a power outage, the main source of power is disrupted. Modern elevators often have backup power systems, such as generators or battery packs, to lower the cab to the nearest floor and open the doors, but these systems may not work optimally, or be connected to all elevators or may not exist in older or less well-maintained buildings.
Today we start with getting the source of power right; leaving complicating factors such as alarms, reset and restart sequences. NFPA 110 is the parent standard which references NFPA 70.
Ω
Public Input Report | 5 October 2022
Second Draft Meeting Minutes | 2 February 2023
Public Input No. 31-NFPA 110-2022 [ Section No. 3.2.4 ] | Page 7
Bibliography
Type 10 Requirements for Emergency Power Systems
Canadian Electrical Code
This content is accessible to paid subscribers. To view it please enter your password below or send mike@standardsmichigan.com a request for subscription details.
Stationary Energy Storage Systems
Should every campus building generate its own power? Sustainability workgroups are vulnerable to speculative hype about net-zero buildings and microgrids. We remind sustainability trendsniffers that the central feature of a distributed energy resource–the eyesore known as the university steam plant–delivers most of the economic benefit of a microgrid. [Comments on Second Draft due April 29th] #StandardsMassachusetts
“M. van Marum. Tweede vervolg der proefneemingen gedaan met Teyler’s electrizeer-machine, 1795” | An early energy storage device | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries
We have been following the developmental trajectory of a new NFPA regulatory product — NFPA 855 Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems — a document with ambitions to formalize the fire safety landscape of the central feature of campus microgrids by setting criteria for minimizing the hazards associated with energy storage systems.
The fire safety of electric vehicles and the companion storage units for solar and wind power systems has been elevated in recent years with incidents with high public visibility. The education industry needs to contribute ideas and data to what we call the emergent #SmartCampus;an electrotechnical transformation — both as a provider of new knowledge and as a user of the new knowledge.
Transcripts of technical deliberation are linked below:
2026 Public Input Report (705 pages) § 2026 Second Draft Meeting Agenda (912 pages)
Comment on the 2026 revision received by March 27, 2025 will be heard at the NFPA June 2025 Expo through NFPA’s NITMAM process.
University of Michigan | Average daily electrical load across all Ann Arbor campuses is on the order of 100 megawatts
A fair question to ask: “How is NFPA 855 going to establish the standard of care any better than the standard of care discovered and promulgated in the NFPA 70-series and the often-paired documents NFPA 110 and NFPA 111?” (As you read the transcript of the proceedings you can see the committee tip-toeing around prospective overlaps and conflicts; never a first choice).
Suffice to say, the NFPA Standards Council has due process requirements for new committee projects and, obviously, that criteria has been met. Market demand presents an opportunity to assemble a new committee with fresh, with new voices funded by a fresh set of stakeholders who, because they are more accustomed to advocacy in open-source and consortia standards development platforms, might have not been involved in the more rigorous standards development processes of ANSI accredited standards developing organizations — specifically the NFPA, whose members are usually found at the top of organization charts in state and local jurisdictions. For example we find UBER — the ride sharing company — on the technical committee. We find another voice from Tesla Motors. These companies are centered in an industry that does not have the tradition of leading practice discovery and promulgation that the building industry has had for the better part of two hundred years.
Our interest in this standard lies on both sides of the education industry — i.e. the academic research side and the business side. For all practical purposes, the most credible, multi-dimensional and effective voice for lowering #TotalCostofOwnership for the emergent smart campus is found in the tenure of Standards Michigan and its collaboration with IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee (E&H). You may join us sorting through the technical, economic and legal particulars and day at 11 AM Eastern time. The IEEE E&H Committee meets online every other Tuesday in European and American time zones; the next meeting on March 26th. All meetings are open to the public.
University of California San Diego Microgrid
You are encouraged to communicate directly with Brian O’Connor, the NFPA Staff Liaison for specific questions. We have some of the answers but Brian is likely to have all of them. CLICK HERE for the NFPA Directory. Additionally, NFPA will be hosting its Annual Conference & Expo, June 17-20 in San Antonio, Texas; usually an auspicious time for meeting NFPA staff working on this, and other projects.
The prospect of installing of energy storage technologies at every campus building — or groups of buildings, or in regions — is clearly transformational if the education facilities industry somehow manages to find a way to drive the cost of operating and maintaining many energy storage technologies lower than the cost of operating and maintaining a single campus distributed energy resource. The education facility industry will have to train a new cadre of microgrid technology specialists who must be comfortable working at ampere and voltage ranges on both sides of the decimal point that separates power engineers from control engineers. And, of course, dynamic utility pricing (set by state regulatory agencies) will continue to be the most significant independent control variable.
Finding a way to make all this hang together is the legitimate work of the academic research side of the university. We find that sustainability workgroups (and elected governing bodies) in the education industry are vulnerable to out-sized claims about microgrids and distributed energy resources; both trendy terms of art for the electrotechnical transformation we call the emergent #SmartCampus.
We remind sustainability trendsniffers that the central feature of a distributed energy resource — the eyesore known as the university steam plant — bears most of the characteristics of a microgrid. In the videoclip linked below a respected voice from Ohio State University provides enlightenment on this point; even as he contributes to the discovery stream with a study unit.
Ohio State University McCracken Power Plant
Issue: [16-131]
Category: District Energy, Electrical, Energy, Facility Asset Management, Fire Safety, Risk Management, #SmartCampus, US Department of Energy
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Bill Cantor (wcantor@ieee.org). Mahesh Illindala
Standards Massachusetts, Standards Texas, Standards Ohio
*It is noteworthy that (NFPA 70) National Electrical Code-Making Panel 1 has appropriated vehicle-to-grid installations into its scope.
Princeton University Power Plant | Click on image
LEARN MORE:
Related Post: Electrical Safety Research Advisory Committee
Bibiography: Campus Microgrids
Higher Education Facilities Conference: The Rise of University Microgrids
Here's an interesting shift – #utilities are starting to invest in big #batteries rather than building new #power plants. Find out why over at @GreenBiz: https://t.co/m0DYK9qAae #energy #EnergyStorage
— IEEE Power & Energy Society (@ieee_pes) February 28, 2019
Mahesh Illindala enlightens understanding of what microgrid is, and is not:
Check out our top story from February 2018 – Making the right battery storage choice for solar panel installations https://t.co/1xyTnd17TF pic.twitter.com/sXJNX0kSfr
— IEC (@IECStandards) January 2, 2019
Rightsizing Electrical Power Systems
Standards Michigan, spun-off in 2016 from the original University of Michigan Business & Finance Operation, has peppered NFPA 70 technical committees writing the 2016-2026 National Electric Code with proposals to reduce the size of building premise feeder infrastructure; accommodating the improvements made in illumination and rotating machinery energy conservation since the 1980’s (variable frequency drives, LED lighting, controls, etc.)
These proposals are routinely voted down in 12-20 member committees representing manufacturers (primarily) though local inspection authorities are complicit in overbuilding electric services because they “bill by the service panel ampere rating”. In other words, when a municipality can charge a higher inspection fee for a 1200 ampere panel, what incentive is there to support changes to the NEC that takes that inspection fee down to 400 amperes?
The energy conservation that would result from the acceptance of our proposals into the NEC are related to the following: reduced step down transformer sizes, reduced wire and conduit sizes, reduced panelboard sizes, reduced electric room cooling systems — including the HVAC cooling systems and the ceiling plenum sheet metal carrying the waste heat away. Up to 20 percent energy savings is in play here and all the experts around the table know it. So much for the economic footprint of the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States — about $120 billion annually.
The market incumbents are complicit in ignoring energy conservation opportunity. To paraphrase one of Mike Anthony’s colleagues representing electrical equipment manufacturers:
“You’re right Mike, but I am getting paid to vote against you.”
NFPA Electrical Division knows it, too.
University of Michigan
Rightsizing Commercial Electrical Power Systems: Review of a New Exception in NEC Section 220.12
Michael A. Anthony – James R. Harvey
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of Houston, Clear Lake, Texas
For decades, application of National Electrical Code (NEC) rules for sizing services, feeders and branch circuits has resulted in unused capacity in almost all occupancy classes. US Department of Energy data compiled in 1999 indicates average load on building transformers between 10 and 25 percent. More recent data gathered by the educational facilities industry has verified this claim. Recognizing that aggressive energy codes are driving energy consumption lower, and that larger than necessary transformers create larger than necessary flash hazard, the 2014 NEC will provide an exception in Section 220.12 that will permit designers to reduce transformer kVA ratings and all related components of the power delivery system. This is a conservative, incremental step in the direction of reduced load density that is limited to lighting systems. More study of feeder and branch circuit loading is necessary to inform discussion about circuit design methods in future revisions of the NEC.
CLICK HERE for complete paper
University of Houston
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwB pic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
— USPTO (@uspto) July 13, 2023
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