If the straw ballots cast during the Second Draft meetings of the National Electric Code technical committees (held last month in in San Diego) are any indication of what the final, formal balloting will be in January 2016, then electrical professionals designing building power systems for the education and university-affiliated healthcare industry will have run out of excuses for not specifying aluminum wiring for building premise wiring, outdoor lighting wiring and medium voltage campus power distribution system wiring.   A version of the proposal linked below was accepted by CMP-1 where the University of Michigan has supported a vote since 1997:

13-9 NFPA 70 2017 Revision Public Input No. 3725 Section No. 110.5

When fully realized, the specification of aluminum wiring will save the education industry overall about $1 billion annually in electrical wiring costs; concluding 9 years of assertive advocacy to remove all the technical ambiguities in the National Electrical Code.    The difficulty the education facilities industry has faced is the intransigence of the 1000 or so engineering managers directly employed by the education industry.  We have identified their intransigence in previous posts as a management problem to be solved; and have approached several of the first names in architectural design and electrical contracting in the United States to identify aluminum wiring not as “avoided cost” or “value engineering” but as a first choice(i.e. base-bid).

The benefit of specifying aluminum wiring also accrues to the many emergency power systems that are present on large university campuses in the US: large emergency feeder runs of, say, 200 to 800 amperes, can be built at 2/3rds lower cost; thereby reducing the number of on-site generators on congested campuses, particularly.    The reduction in greenhouse gases for our industry as a result of fewer generators (and generator tests) is significant.

This code change, and other code changes proposed for the education facilities industry will be discussed during the next on-line meetings of the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee tomorrow, December 1st.  Login information is available at this link: https://site.ieee.org/icps-ehe/

Issue: [13-9]

Contact: Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey

Category: Electrical Power, Management Finance & Administration