The latest development in UPS that could herald a big move away from traditional lead acid batteries is that of the fuel cell. Palcan Fuel Cell Co Ltd does nothing but develop fuel cell technologies and applications. They have a nifty 500W UPS with a fuel cell that will last 5 hours. The only catch may be the 1,800 liters of hydrogen from 6 canisters required to run it and off course the costs. Fuel celled power protection is definitely on the horizon and all it takes is some of the economic barriers to fall before we may well see such products used every day.

The IEE are running a new seminar on power protection later this year on 27th March at Savoy Place, London. We suspect that as power protection becomes an even hotter subject for engineers and business continuity managers that this type of event will gain increasing important an momentum. Riello UPS is helping to sponsor the event.

Another hospital suffers power problems and has to close its accident and emergency facilities. This piece on the website for Havering Live again shows the effect of a simple power cut and the need for a good business continuity plan.

We picked up this piece by market researchers Frost and Sullivan on the PR Newswire on the growth in UK Hospitals for UPS are becoming the product of choice. The press release cites consultation and brand awareness as being the drivers that will lead to increased UPS provision.

When you connect any computer to a wall socket you are drawing power from a blind source. You have no idea how clean, stable and secure the electricity is coming through that socket unless have already fitted a power protection device.

I found this piece on the website for PC Advisor - a forum on PC Power Supply Failures. The every day wear and tear on computer power supplies caused by power problems such as spikes, electrical noise, sags and surges will eventually lead to power supply failure. This can be prevented with a good UPS or slowed down by installing some form of filtering.

The effects of a simple power failure are always under estimated. This is a tragic story of how people were stranded in the top floor of a London care home as a power failure struck.

The greater emphasis on duty of care and health and safety for customers and employers places even greater pressures on all managers to investigate their business continuity plans and make sure that they have local standby power generation in place for such eventualities.

This is one of those great sites on the internet - How Stuff Works. I came across it looking for information on batteries and how they work. This piece helps those wanting a basic understanding. When we run our Riello UPS Seminars we always get questions on batteries. They are one of the most common items in a UPS to fail and yet the easiest to ignor from a maintenance view point.

Another page of interest is the one covering Fuel Cells - still very expensive but I suspect that we will seem them used in Uninterruptible Power Supplies within the next five years.

One of the least favourite memories of visiting an airport is the smell of kerosene burning. NASA as you can image continues to spend millions looking at alternative ways to move us from A to B. This page on their website looks at how to achieve cleaner skies.

What I like about this type of research is the technology spin offs. After all sending a man to the moon in the 1960s brought us the non-stick frying pan amongst many other technologies. So who knows. One day we may be able to power our cars by dropping banana skins into the fuel tanks.

Wind Power must be one of the easiest forms of alternative energy sources to install. I just came across this great alternative energy blog and a story on a 15MW installation in Ecuador. What I like is the involvement with Protocol Energy - the Canadian alternative energy generator.

For more information on the 60MW installation that provides power to our homes in Prestatyn visit the npower website.

Strange. There seems to be a theme to these posts just after Christmas and New Year. Here’s another interesting journal but this time on Home Energy. I particularly like then idea of individuals taking a D-I-Y approach to home power generation.

This is one of those interesting websites covering an issue that affects us every day - energy and importantly alternative energy sources. I chatted with a local taxi driver in Prestatyn the other day who worked by day for a major building firm. They have the technology to put low-cost solar panels into every new build house now but leave them out because your average Joe and his family are not concerned with energy issues in their home. Will this ever change ?