News
Celebrating 30 Years of Safearth Training
We have a proud 30-year history in advancing earthing theory and practice. This has led to our expertise in safe power earthing systems being recognised worldwide.
For the full picture, we actually have to look back further than 30 years though, to the 1980s. That’s when a technical specialist earthing group was formed within Shortland Electricity – a local power utility in Newcastle, Australia. Members of this group would then go on to form ‘Safe Earth Engineered Solutions’, later becoming Safearth.
The actual formation of Safearth was somewhat organic at first. As mentioned, we can point to our beginnings earlier than 1991, but that’s when things really began to crystallise with a few key events and achievements. We’ll be looking back on a few of these milestones over the coming months, but for now, we’re celebrating 30 years since our first training course.
30 years since the first public training course in earthing system design.
On 25–29 November 1991 Safearth founders held the first-ever earthing system training course that was open to the public. It was run on behalf of the Electricity Supply Association of Australia (ESAA) and was titled Safe Earthing System Design.
Ever since that first course, we’ve been running a whole range of training courses, both public as well as specifically tailored to individual companies. We’re constantly striving towards improving electrical safety and standards nationwide, and now even worldwide!
During this time, we’ve maintained our reputation as Australia’s leading provider of training services in the areas of earthing and lightning protection. Key to our success has been the fact that, rather than presenting a lecture, we encourage audience participation and deliver content in an engaging way. Our courses cover the fundamentals all the way up to the advanced level and can be completely customised to your needs.
The first Australian substation earthing guidelines
At around the same time that the public training courses were starting, the soon-to-be Safearth founders also made significant contributions to Australia’s first-ever substation earthing design guidelines – the ENA EG1 Substation Earthing Guide.
Traditionally, earthing systems were a very small aspect of substation design and were often given little consideration. The earthing design process would be developed in-house by the individual electrical utilities, with some guidance from foreign standards, and was often a case of simply re-using a previous design (a practice we now know to have significant risks). Consequently, design processes varied significantly across the country, as did the safety and effectiveness of the earthing systems.
EG1 provided the theoretical and practical guidance to encourage and support more comprehensive and effective design and testing of earthing systems, which has contributed to a substantial improvement in electrical safety in the years since.
If you or your team need a better understanding of earthing risk, or need to learn how to design and test earthing systems, then we can assist.