By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer
PEFG provides forensic investigation, power system engineering, and expert witness testimony for the electrical power industry — led personally by Jay Prigmore, Ph.D., P.E. Every engagement is scoped, analyzed, and signed by the same doctoral-level engineer who sits on the IEEE 1584 committee that writes the arc flash standard — whether the deliverable is a design package, a failure analysis, or sworn testimony.
400+ forensic investigations into electrical fires, equipment failures, and incidents — transformers, generators, switchgear, breakers, and wind turbines.
Power system protection, arc flash, and reliability engineering for mission-critical facilities, from data centers to offshore platforms.
Every deliverable — design calculation, failure analysis, or expert report — is built to survive independent review, whether that review is a peer check, an owner’s engineer, or cross-examination.
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 — from the design decisions that prevent a failure, to the forensic investigation that explains one, to the testimony that holds up under cross-examination.
Testifying expert in 15+ matters exceeding $10B in aggregate 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 completed.
Read more →IEEE 1584-2018/2002 incident-energy analysis, PPE categorization, and NFPA 70E compliance for facilities where the study needs to hold up under scrutiny.
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.
Discuss a study →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.
Scope a design →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 actually caused the damage attributed to it.
Read more →Nacelle fires, converter and generator failures, collector system faults, lightning damage, and protection misoperation.
Read more →
Jay Prigmore leads every PEFG engagement personally. At Exponent (2016–2020) he led over 400 forensic investigations and served as a testifying expert in more than 15 litigation and arbitration matters worth over $10 billion in aggregate. From 2020–2025 he led electrical quality and field reliability engineering for Google's 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 lead 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 engineered 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 rather than asserted. The open derivations and calculators at PowerEngCalc show the methods in full, and Arc Flash Files offers 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+, $10B+ aggregate |
| Investigations | 400+ completed |
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 built to withstand deposition and cross-examination.
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 there is no open-ended exposure.
IEEE 1584 is the IEEE Guide for Performing Arc-Flash Hazard Calculations — the governing standard for calculating incident energy and arc flash boundaries in electrical systems. Voting membership on the working group means participating directly in how the standard is written and revised.
In litigation, that distinction matters: an opinion about whether an arc flash study was performed correctly carries more weight from someone who helped author the standard being applied.
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, because I did the work myself — from the first site visit to the final page.— Jay Prigmore, Ph.D., P.E., Principal
Direct principal access. Conflict check and retention letter, typically within one to two business days.