Rich Keil of Commonwealth Associates

The Substation grounding tutorial will present the design philosophy of IEEE-80, Guide for Safety in AC Substation Grounding, through the review of the historical development of the Guide.  The important advances in substation grounding will be discussed from the development of the equations of simple ground resistance electrodes to sophisticated computer programs, the interaction of the substation ground grid and current flowing through the earth that produce earth potentials, human response to these earth potentials and the criteria to design a safe substation ground grid to control the earth potentials to safe levels.

Biography:

Rich has been a substation engineer at Commonwealth Associates, Inc., a full-service utility consulting firm headquartered in Jackson, Michigan for 24 years.  Prior to joining Commonwealth Associates, Rich worked for the Dayton Power and Light Company for 34 years, retiring as Manager, Design

Engineering, responsible for substation and transmission engineering.  Rich’s experience at Dayton Power and Light Company includes substation design, project and construction management and support, construction/outage scheduling. equipment failure analysis, and emergency response. He also served as a member of the ECAR Electric Equipment Panel.  Rich has been a member of the IEEE PES Substations Committee since 1976 and is a member of the working groups responsible for standards and guides for substation safety, direct stroke lightning protection, bus design, grounding connectors, and ground testing. He has been a member of the IEEE working group responsible for substation grounding guide IEEE-80 since 1976 and chair since 1986.  As chair Rich has been responsible for the preparation of IEEE Std 80-2000, IEEE Guide for Safety in AC Substation Grounding and IEEE Std 80-2013, IEEE Guide for Safety in AC Substation Grounding editions and is working on the next edition of IEEE-80.   Mr. Keil also served as chair of the IEEE Substations Committee Transmission and Distribution Substations Design Subcommittee from 2009-2015.

Email:

Address:Dayton, Ohio, United States