A veteran of the electrical testing industry and subject matter expert for more than 25 years, Mose Ramieh, vice president, business development at CBS Services, started his presentation off with a disclaimer: “If only I’d known then what I know now, I would have done things differently in the early design stages.” That’s a common perception among electrical professionals, he notes, when they’re tasked with identifying, reducing, and ultimately trying to eliminate arc flash hazards.
In this exclusive video chat, Ellen Parson, editor-in-chief of EC&M, sat down with Ramieh at the PowerTest24 Conference, held in late February in Dallas and sponsored by the InterNational Electrical Testing Association (NETA), to go over successful strategies and best practices for arc flash mitigation.
What most of us want to know is are we, as an industry, making strides in this area? According to Ramieh, the industry has made a lot of progress over the last 20 years, noting that right around the year 2000 was when NFPA 70E, Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace, started gaining more traction. “We are making progress in the education of qualified workers, the signage and studies being performed on our systems, and lots of strides made in engineering,” he says. “NFPA 70E continues to refine how the calculations get done, further quantifying the arc flash hazards. In those areas, I think we’re making tremendous strides.”
That’s not to say every facility is adopting those practices, however. “I still go to facilities every month that you walk in and they either don’t have an arc flash study or haven’t kept it up,” he says.
Two key themes jumped out as significant for electrical professionals striving to reduce arc flash hazards in the field: speed as a recurring theme and how some upstream protective devices cannot be made to operate faster. In the Q&A, Ramieh explains why these concepts are so important, noting there are three levers to pull. “First, we can try and reduce the fault current (a lot of time that’s coming from the utility). The second one is we can increase the speed at which faults are cleared (if I shorten the time, then I have less fault current), and then the third thing is we can create distance from the fault,” he says.
These three strategies work together to make a safer environment not only for the equipment but also for qualified workers. When in doubt, Ramieh recommends electrical technicians turn to NFPA 70B, Standard for Electrical Equipment Maintenance, which recently evolved from a recommended practice to a standard in January 2023.
“Every time the technology gets better, we learn more lessons,” he says. “This will only continue as we create systems that are safer and more reliable.”
