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What does the future hold for our industry — especially when it comes to those all-important standards that ensure reliability, protect property, and help us to avoid injury or death? As we revise and update codes and standards from NETA, NFPA, IEEE, ASTM, NEMA, CSA, and OSHA, I think we should all read this very carefully, especially the summary.

Critical to Electrical Reliability and Safety for Industrial and Commercial Power Systems It happens in a fraction of a second – and what happens after that can mean the difference between the inconvenience of a power outage to a large-scale electrical failure and/or fire. Therefore, the assurance that your electrical power system does what it is intended to do is paramount.

Introduction: What Happened? At 5:45 a.m. on a particularly cold winter day, an industrial manufacturing plant experienced a significant electrical fault event on a 15 kV substation that feeds power to approximately 30% of the manufacturing operations. The main circuit breaker in one of the plant’s three medium-voltage substations experienced a fault, an arc flash event, and a subsequent trip of the entire lineup, apparently due to a rodent that caused a phase-to-phase fault in the 15 kV potential transformer (PT) compartment. The fault traveled into the medium-voltage bus assembly in the metal-clad switchgear lineup, ultimately causing the main breaker to trip and de-energizing a large portion of the facility.

There is no better electrical safety standard than NFPA 70E. It’s a work practices document, composed and approved through consensus and input from a wide range of subject matter experts and members of the public, following the ANSI standards-making process with an end goal specifically designed to protect personnel from the hazards of electricity, especially the electrical worker in the field.

We received a question from one of our NETA members that we see fairly often, so we decided to do a Q&A session on the topic. And if you have any questions on the 70E, forwarded them to us and we’ll see if we can answer them for you!