Managing Editor’s Note:
The following panel was presented at the 2026 Marcon Conference’s 30th year in Knoxville, TN, hosted by the Reliability Maintenance Center at the University of Tennessee. https://marcon.utk.edu.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series, with the remaining three parts to be published in the next monthly APC magazine. Additionally, the entire Panel can be viewed on our YouTube Channel.

Moderator Alan Ross: Whether you are responsible for electrical systems or not, at present, you will be responsible for electrical systems some day because they will find you and they will challenge you. And here’s why: motors don’t run, conveyors don’t convey, nothing works if there is no power. The consequences of loss of power are great.

Our panelists are quite unique. They all have the responsibility of some sort, either in testing, maintenance, service, whatever you want to call it, in the industry of detecting problems with electric power and then helping solve them:

Jon Bucciarelli just spoke in a group. Jon is the president of SD Myers and has been with them after a career with General Motors.

Next to him is Adrian Messer, who I met when he was at UE Systems. Adrian taught me more about ultrasound in 2 hours than anybody else has ever taught me about ultrasound. He is now with SDT out of Toronto, instrumentation and training.

Next to him is my good friend Mark Paul, who is the Executive VP of Global Markets at IRISS. Mark also just did a presentation.

And at the end is Mike Doolan, who I believe manages more data centers electrical assets than anyone else I have ever met.

Each of our panelists has a unique perspective about our subject, the new regulations from NFPA as a game changer. And if we don’t change with it, we’re going to suffer the consequences of electrical failure.

With that, I’m going to ask each of our folks to just talk a little bit about, from your perspective, the importance of NFPA 70A and 70B. Jon, we’ll start with you.

Jon: Thanks, Alan, I am glad to be here. As mentioned, I have the privilege of serving as the President of SDMyers, which is an electrical reliability company. We specialize in transformer testing, maintenance, repair, and we have a philosophy there that is called MaxLife, and it’s rooted in this foundation that the life of a transformer is the life of the paper. And within that too, we were excited when NFPA 70B came out with their new requirements because that has always been our stance, that inspections and testing should occur at a minimal on an annual basis to be able to understand the risks to electric power systems and transformers. And we’re excited about NFPA 70B because the idea is that most folks take it as ‘I must do this because somebody says’ as opposed to ‘what are the things that we can do in order to eliminate accidents, injuries?’ As I mentioned earlier in the session, nobody really thinks about what’s going on in a transformer or around a transformer unless something majorly goes wrong. And at best-case scenario, it’s an operational interruption. Worst-case scenario, it’s a death.

We really want to shift the focus from ‘should I do this or shouldn’t I do this’, to essentially ‘you need to do this because it protects the livelihood of your people’. And for us in our organization, that’s critically important. We have a passion for that. And the idea is that you cannot have a safe place in your organization if you do not have a reliable place. That is the connection between Safety and Reliability.

Alan: Adrian, your thoughts?

Adrian: What we do is maintenance and reliability, and it involves safety. You know, we want to make sure that our workers are safe, and we provide a safe environment for them as well as provide a framework where they can do their work safely. Not every plant, not every facility that you go to has good electrical safety and maintenance practices.

One of the fun things about my job and many of the other panelists is we get to go out into lots of different plants, facilities of all shapes, sizes, and ages. And sometimes when I walk out of a plant, I’m thankful that I was able to walk out because I saw some unsafe things going on.

So that is where NFPA 70E being the electrical safety standard and now 70B being the electrical maintenance standard, kind of work in conjunction with each other, even to the point that the first couple of sentences of the scope of 70B begins with ‘this is in an effort to improve worker safety’. So many of our users of airborne ultrasound technology, if for no other reason, will use ultrasound as kind of the first line of defense because we can listen without having to open anything up. It is a non-intrusive way that we can listen for problems before we ever have to open anything up.

Nobody really thinks about what’s going on in a transformer or around a transformer unless something majorly goes wrong.

We want to make sure that our workers are safe, and we provide a safe environment for them as well as provide a framework where they can do their work safely.

It is not a game changer if just the standards change and nobody does anything with it.

Alan: Mark Paul, would you give your perspective?

Mark: Thanks Alan, I am honored to work for IRISS as we provide electrical maintenance safety devices, everything from infrared windows all the way through sensors and the entire scope in between so that people have the ability to accurately and fully analyze the equipment that these are mounted on to provide safety at the end of the day.

We have the ability to help people get insight and keep them safe in doing so. With Alan’s question originally – what was the impact of the new NFPA 70 standards, and is it a game changer – only if it is implemented. It is not a game changer if just the standards change and nobody does anything with it. After the standards are written, implementation of what those standards now require, that is really the basic foundation. Unfortunately, it’s the minimum that we should be trying to achieve. It is the same thing as if you minimally try to hit just the standards of being married. It doesn’t work too well. If you really want a great marriage, you have to go above and beyond not just what is the minimum, but you try to do the maximum if you want the best possible end result.

The same thing applies to all our facilities. If we’re just trying to maintain to meet the standards, we are not doing the right thing. I believe that these standards are a good starting point. I think it should give us an idea of what to focus on, the things that we should actively be measuring and keeping records of, but I think that’s just the beginning part of the process. And the more we learn from that and then take action on what we learn, reinvest that knowledge into making our systems, programs, operations better, stronger, and more well-inspected, then we’ll truly see the game changing impact of NFPA.

Alan: Excellent. Mike, your thoughts?

Mike: This is my first Marcon, so I want to say thank you for having me here. First time in Knoxville as well, so I think it has been a great conference. I have seen some great presentations and met some great companies, so again, thanks for having me here. Just for some context.

We look after around 800 data centers around the world. We don’t own the data centers, we operate them for our customers who are either the hyperscalers or colocation companies who either have multi-tenanted or single occupancy data centers, or a lot of them are enterprise data centers, which some of you’ve probably got your own data center in your portfolios as well.

But as it comes to power and size and scale, I’ve been in data centers for 30 years and I don’t think there’s been a time like the last 12 months where they are just all over the news, all over social media. Data centers have just taken on a whole new lease of life really with the rise of AI and high-performance computing and things like that.

Just to put some things in perspective, probably the average size of those 800 data centers we run today is about 10 megawatts. They typically have a capacity of around that. Therefore, you need probably 20-plus megawatts of incoming power. You probably need 15, 20 megawatts of generation to give you the redundancy you need and enough to do the cooling as well

Then that all goes through to the computers. So average of 10 megawatts today. We’re now talking to companies about 300, 400, 500-megawatt campuses, sometimes up to a gigawatt campus as well. So those headlines you’re seeing about all the investment in data centers is true. So, that is requiring an awful lot of power, with hundreds of transformers, miles and miles of cables, thousands of switch boards, tens of thousands of breakers; and they all need to be maintained typically without shutdowns. They are often designed to be concurrently maintainable. Our job is to try to keep those facilities going 24/7, 365 without shutdowns, do all the electrical and mechanical maintenance that we need to do and keep our people and our vendors safe while they are doing it.

That is what we are, what we are kind of up against. And I think 70B has been a game changer in terms of making some of the requirements a lot more mandatory. It is not exactly that word in the documents, but certainly more required than they were before, which I think helps get you off the should we or shouldn’t we do these things. It does mean we have to do a lot of work and make sure we do it safely. We are doing all the operating procedures around how to enforce those regulations in a safe way. About a third of those data centers are in the US where obviously 70B applies. The rest are outside, but we certainly within CBRE, we use it as our global benchmark standard that we want everybody to adopt globally.

Data center have just taken on a whole new lease of life really with the rise of AI and high-perfomance computing.