Electrical Innovation Wins Construction Industry Award

The award for innovation in construction usually goes to some gee-whiz idea, perhaps from an architect for "something like a new design on a bridge suspension," says Paul Harrison. But this year the award for new, efficient construction systems that cost less went to the electrical industry, thanks to a nomination pushed through by Harrison, a member of IBEW Local 252, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Local 252 member Paul Harrison (left) and Michael Tennefoss, vice president of Product Marketing for Echelon Corp., pose with the 2003 NOVA award.

Harrison is a second-generation electrician who wrote the winning nomination in the NOVA awards presented annually in Dearborn, Michigan. The Construction Innovation Forum gives the NOVA awards to advance "innovations in the construction industry that increase efficiency and reduce the cost." Competition for the awards is open to the construction industry world-wide.

Harrison nominated the Echelon Corporations LonWorks technology, a network platform that controls all of a buildings subsystems. Harrison sharpened his own LonWorks expertise as an instructor in the Local 252 journeyman upgrading class.

"In traditional buildings, lighting, card access, climate control and the other subsystems could not communicate with each other," Harrison explains. But Echelons LonWorks has provided a common language, using a protocol called LonTalk, embedded in a neuron chip.

And Local 252 Business Manager Greg Stephens says LonWorks gets another leg up on the competition by being compatible with any products from other vendors, like General Electric and Honeywell, so it is not confined to products created by its own company.

"Technology is advancing in the electrical construction industry due in part to the growth of Internet use," Harrison said. "I see computers and intelligent devices and networking becoming increasingly important in the work we do. Buildings will become more and more intelligent, which increases value and makes them more secure and efficient."

The IBEW and NECA were the co-sponsors of the 2003 NOVA awards, with IBEW Local 58 of Detroit joining as co-hosts with Local 252. Stephens says some of the construction industry innovations nominated "are truly astounding." He cited a battery-powered machine for tying tie-wire and a "rig like a lawn tractor in which a small x-ray machine" checks the ground for obstacles down to six-feet deep.

IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill was the keynote speaker at the NOVA awards and at another construction industry event in Dearborn earlier in the same day. He told the audience, which included leaders of the Construction Users Round Table (CURT), that contractors and unions must always remember that doing the best possible job for the customer is the industrys top priority.

"Those who use our serviceslike General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to name a feware the most important people in our industry and our reason for being," President Hill said. CURT is an organization founded in 2000 by a group of Fortune 500 corporation executives responsible for construction and engineering.

President Hill also emphasized the need for the construction industry to embrace technological changes to keep the industry moving forward. " We see men and women in our industryworker, contractor and customer, taking a greater degree of responsibility for the future. The uncertain times in which we live have driven home the need for all to do their part in transforming our industry. Construction remains a major driving force in our economy, and it is up to us to make it into something newdifferent and more productive than ever," he said.

IBEWCURRENTS

September 2003 IBEW Journal

Local 252