ESE Standards Withdrawn

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bphgravity

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Florida
FYI for all you lightning protection guys...

We are pleased to announce to our members that the standards for ESE (Early Streamer Emission) lightning rods are now out of force/withdrawn within Europe. This includes the notorious French ESE Standard which was the first to be adopted and which was widely used by ESE vendors to mislead potential customers, and to also pressure other countries into adopting standards for ESE devices. Within Europe, Spain was one of the countries which succumbed under the pressure of ESE vendors.

Please see the attached announcement (dated May 2009) which appears on the home page of ICLP (International Conference on Lightning Protection):
www.iclp-centre.org

Scientists opposed ESE theory since the beginning. ESE vendors ignored the position of the scientific community and tried to drown it by their commercial propaganda. However, standards are required to be harmonized within the European Community (EC). As I understand it, individual countries are permitted to adopt their own national standards but any conflicting provisions with standards of the IEC (which are the official standards for Europe) have to be removed after a certain period of time if the IEC rejects them.

Based on the above, administrative procedures of the European Community have been successfully used to force the withdrawal of ESE standards in France, Spain, and any other European country which adopted such a standard. The decision took effect during February 2009.

Many of our readers recall the decade-long failed campaign which ESE vondors waged against NFPA (National Fire Protection Association). It should be comforting to NFPA and to all the parties who opposed ESE during the related hearings to know that they were right all along.

As to standards organizations outside Europe that have been or are being pressured by ESE vendors into legitimizing the false claims of ESE vendors, you now have a solid reason to dismiss ESE vendors and to scrap any standards which they may have forced you to adopt.

Literally speaking, the above does not mean that ESE devices cannot be sold in Europe. France, Spain and any other European country can keep standards for ESE devices but they have to do the following:

1) Degrade them from national standards to industry product standards, and;

2) Delete from them any provision which conflicts with the IEC standard. This means that they have to be placed/spaced based on the same rules which govern Franklin rods. In other words, an ESE device has to be treated as equivalent to a single Franklin rod and all claims of an enhanced zone of protection have to be dropped.

The unit cost of an ESE device is at least 100 times the cost of a Franklin rod. Thus, while the European decision does not ban ESE devices, it makes them not viable from the commercial point of view. Hence it in effect amounts to a death sentence for ESE devices.

Recently, the administrators of the reputable ABB company made the mistake of getting their company into the ESE business by acquiring one of the small companies that manufacture ESE devices. ABB failed to change its position after learning of the opposing opinion of the scientific community. This should be a wake up call to the administrators of ABB to realize that they made a serious mistake. It is imperative of a company which is a major supplier of the electric utility industry that it restores its rerputation by dropping its ESE line of products without further delay.

While she may never see this message, the Honourable Judge Roslyn O. Silver of the US District Court of Arizona should be proud that she was 100% correct when she found it to be lierally false to advertise ESE devices as having an enhanced zone of protection. At that time, ERICO used threats of legal action to prevent any one from saying that this judgement applied to its products. It would be interesting to see what ERICO will now say about the EC decision which applies to all ESE devices regardless of their make or type.

Finally, I wish to thank Professor Aage E. Pedersen of Denmark for bringing the ICLP posting to our attention. It was the tireless efforts of him and his colleagues within the scientific commuinity of ICLP that led to the above decision of the European Community. Hence congratulations are due to them and to all other parties who sopke up against the false claims ESE vendors.

Abdul M. Mousa, Ph.D., P. Eng., Fellow IEEE
Lightning protection consultant
Vancouver, Canada
abdul_mousa@...
 
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