A View of the Standards Issues

I am not sure that we are moving to a common end. IEEE has declared they will not participate in the ASC committees any more and I think that is a done deal. So, IEEE standards will be submitted by IEEE to ANSI directly and things should move ahead in getting these standards done. IEEE did this is in a poor way and they do not have the support of the Technical Committees. That doesn't seem to make any difference. The Technical Committees have agree to retain the ASC but their role will be to process non-IEEE standards (of which I don't think there are many) and to offer an un-official review of the IEEE standards assuming that the technical committees will follow the un-official procedure to send the documents to the ASC. In my personnel opinion, this will fall apart with time and the IEEE documents will not be sent to the ASC.

The meeting in Washington with the utility executives is to see if the leadership of the major players can come to some agreement on a common plan and then to direct the standard committee members to take the appropriate action. The result of the meeting is that a common, simple process would be best and processing all standards within IEEE might offer that. But there are some negatives that need to be taken into account. For example, which group of people represents the USA on the IEC work? IEEE by definition can't do that since they are an international group and you need a national group to form the USA position. Also, if you are writing ANSI standards, you can be USA centered. Is that the role IEEE wants to take or are they and international standard writing body? So, there will be smaller group of

the executives that will meet to outline a process they would like and then we will see if we can get agreement on that process. The ASCs may or may not be part of that. I am not sure of the timing but I think the smaller group might meet in September or so.

I know that I will be talking about the ASC 37 at the NEMA meeting in September. The significance here is that the NEMA section that I belong to funds the ASC work. I don't see a lot of value in ASC 37 and I am opposed to budgeting money to process IEEE standards un-officially. So, we may ask the Technical Committees to pay for the ASC 37 work, and I don't think they will. This will put more stress on the viability of the ASC for IEEE work.