There is a new IEEE Standard nearing completion. It is called:

IEEE 1814 Recommended Practice for Electrical System Design Techniques to Improve Electrical Safety

The overview of this standard is that the Recommended Practice will communicate "electrical safety by design" concepts and their benefits. Current standards and codes place minimum requirements on electrical system designers and manufacturers that yield functional, reasonably safe electrical installations. The final product of this working group will capture, in one location, a wealth of "electrical safety by design" concepts that have been published in recent IEEE papers and in other industry sources.

Here is this week’s question:

Until reading it here, have you heard of IEEE 1814?
Yes
No

So where is the committee activity tracked. It would appear the web page for meetings has seen no activity for quite some time. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1814/Meetings/

Doug

I just spoke with an IEEE 1814 Executive Committee member (I'm on the committee too) and he said the website is there as you saw, but they really haven't done much with it and focus on the standard. The standard itself is reaching a completed phase and will be going through balloting so it is pretty far along. I wrote a short article a little over a year ago that provides some information about IEEE 1814 and it is here: http://www.ecmag.com/section/systems/control-risk

It should be a pretty helpful standard for providing guidance for designing safer electrical power systems.

Hi Jim

I have not heard of the IEEE 1814 standard? However I am very interested. Any idea as to when we may expect release, or how far the technical committee is with content?

Thanks Jim

Hi Len,

Good question. We are on Draft 10 and it has reached a point where it is close to being ready to go to ballot and head to the finish line. I can provide an update from time to time as it moves forward.

- Jim

This is one of those "standards" that adds confusion to IEEE "standards" by the way. Some IEEE "standards" such as this one are resources or guidance documents of some kind...not something that you need to follow precisely but more of some suggestions or ideas. The grounding standard is similar...it gives a huge list of methods of grounding with scant discussion of why to choose one over the other. IEEE 1584 is similar. It contains no less than 3 different incident energy calculation methods. When someone says that they calculated incident energy according to IEEE 1584, it might mean they used the Lee equation for everthing! Finally reference to the standard might mean something like IEEE C2 or the IEEE 802 family, or the ANSI C37 family. These are all standards that mean just that. There is one and only one way to do things. For instance within the IEEE C37/ANSI standards, standardized sizes for breakers, transformers, fuses, connectors, etc., are made.

In contrast for the most part with NFPA although you almost never get background material and are left guessing as to why something in those standards is the way it is, there is one and only one way to do things. I might see engineering specifications refer to an IEEE standard (by someone who clearly never read it) but for instance OSHA rarely references an IEEE standard.

Maybe this is just a problem with how the committee structure is set up to where you have to please all people to get anything passed.

Being a consensus standard, some compromises may occur in order to reach agreement. It is quite a process.

My personal favorites (to a degree) are the EPRI documents. Unfortunately you get hundreds of pages on something fairly simple. It might contain say a procedure for doing a PM on a particular brand of circuit breaker. It contains basically EVERYTHING though and when you get done, the only things left to question are anything where nothing is not established yet.

Then again, people complain that IEEE 1584 is close to $1,000 when NFPA 70E is under $100, and a single EPRI document (under 10 years old) starts at about $5,000 and goes up from there.