By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer
Forensic investigation and expert testimony when an electrical failure has to be explained, and power system studies and design that keep failures from happening. Jay Prigmore, Ph.D., P.E. does the work personally.
When an electrical fire, failure, or injury has to be explained, and the explanation has to rest on the evidence and the governing standards. Retained by plaintiff and defense counsel, insurers, and subrogation teams.
Conflict check and retention letter, typically within one to two business days.
When a power system needs to be studied, a failure diagnosed and corrected, or a facility designed, by the same engineer who investigates electrical failures for a living.
Written scope and fee before any work begins.
By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer
PEFG's practice spans the full lifecycle of an electrical power system: the design decisions that prevent a failure, the forensic investigation that explains one, and the testimony that sets out the basis for each opinion.
Testifying expert in 15+ matters, including matters with over $1B in potential dispute value. Deposition and trial testimony, report preparation, and case consulting.
Read more →Origin-and-cause investigation of electrical fires and equipment failures across transformers, generators, switchgear, and breakers. 400+ investigations led or directed.
Read more → · Electrical fires →IEEE 1584-2018/2002 incident-energy analysis, PPE categorization, and NFPA 70E compliance, with the inputs and assumptions stated so the study can be checked.
Read more →Short-circuit, load flow, motor starting, and protective device coordination for low-, medium-, and high-voltage systems, run to IEEE 399 and IEEE 242 practice.
Read more →Partial discharge testing, transformer DGA interpretation to IEEE C57.104, and power quality investigation for industrial and data center assets.
Transformer diagnostics →Medium-voltage distribution, protection, and DC power design for data center, industrial, offshore, and renewable facilities, sealed under active PE licensure.
Read more →Where the dispute turns on a specific class of equipment, the analysis is equipment-specific. These are the asset types PEFG is most often retained to investigate.
Stator and rotor failures, excitation and control faults, out-of-phase synchronization, and standby sets that failed to start or carry load.
Read more →DGA interpretation, winding and bushing failures, tap changers, thermal aging and loading history, through-fault damage, and transformer fires.
Read more →Harmonics, voltage sags, transients, and unbalance, and whether a documented event caused the damage attributed to it.
Read more →Nacelle fires, converter and generator failures, collector system faults, lightning damage, and protection misoperation.
Read more →Bus and insulation failures, breakers that failed to interrupt, and relay misoperation, located from the relay record and confirmed by the physical evidence.
Read more →Substation, switchgear, UPS, and generator failures in mission-critical facilities, where redundancy hides the first failure and restoration pressure threatens the evidence.
Read more →
Jay Prigmore leads every PEFG engagement personally. Over his career he has led or directed more than 400 forensic investigations and has testified at deposition, trial, or arbitration in more than 15 matters, including matters with over $1 billion in potential dispute value. From 2020 to 2025 he led electrical quality and field reliability engineering for a global hyperscale data center fleet, building the incident-response and forensic-analysis teams that investigate failures across a live, mission-critical fleet.
He is a voting member of the IEEE 1584 committee, a founding member of the NFPA Technical Committee on Electrical Inspection Practices, and an IEEE Senior Member. He is the author of the CIGRE Green Book chapter on fault current limiters and author of the HVDC chapter in The Power Grid. Earlier in his career he helped engineer an arc-flash mitigation device at G&W Electric that won Plant Engineering Magazine’s Product of the Year.
The engineering behind the practice is published. The open derivations and calculators at PowerEngCalc show the methods in full, and Ohmics provides a lower-cost automated first pass on an existing arc flash study.
| Education | Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, ASU |
| Licensure | P.E., 18 states |
| IEEE | Senior Member |
| NFPA Technical Committee | Founding Member |
| Testifying Engagements | 15+, including $1B+ matters |
| Investigations | 400+ led or directed |
Send incident details or a scope description. A licensed PE reviews it directly.
Fee arrangement, retention letter, and evidence collection plan defined before work begins.
Site investigation and a written report that states the methodology, the evidence relied on, and the basis for each opinion.
Retain a forensic electrical engineer as soon as an electrical fire, equipment failure, or injury is likely to result in a claim or litigation. Early retention matters because electrical evidence degrades quickly: switchgear gets cleaned or scrapped, relay event files roll over, and SCADA data ages out of retention. An engineer involved before evidence is disturbed can establish origin and cause far more defensibly than one brought in after remediation.
Electrical expert witness work is normally billed hourly on a time-and-expense basis. Deposition and trial testimony are billed at a higher hourly rate than analysis and report work, which is standard practice across the profession.
PEFG provides a written rate schedule and a task-by-task budget estimate in the retention letter before any work starts, so the expected cost is documented before work begins.
IEEE 1584 is the IEEE Guide for Performing Arc-Flash Hazard Calculations. It is the method most widely used to calculate incident energy and arc flash boundaries, and NFPA 70E lists it among the available calculation methods. Working group members draft and vote on revisions to the guide.
That work gives a working knowledge of how the equations were developed and where the model’s limits are. An opinion on whether a study was performed correctly still has to rest on the edition in force, the inputs, and the evidence in the matter.
Both. PEFG accepts retention from either side, as well as from insurers, owners, and manufacturers. Every engagement begins with a conflict-of-interest check against all named parties before a retention letter is issued.
Because engagements are handled personally by the principal rather than routed through a staffing process, a conflict check and retention letter can typically be turned around within one to two business days. Site inspections are scheduled according to evidence preservation needs and site access.
An engineering opinion is only as strong as the work behind it. I sign every PEFG report myself, and I perform or personally direct the work behind it, from the first site visit to the final page.Jay Prigmore, Ph.D., P.E., Principal
Conflict check and retention letter typically within one to two business days. Study and design scopes in writing before any work begins.