Power Protection and UPS Blog

I just came across a new item from LPQI which offers an interesting process to help organisations assess their energy management.

Titled ‘Energy Management: self assessment’ the paper identifies three types of energy use in manufacturing facilities: (1) production of goods, (2) space conditioning and (3) general facility support such as lighting.

The paper comments that besides reducing costs an active energy management process can also improve production output, operations, maintenance and the environment.

On Thursday 7th June 2007, we will be presenting the Comms Business Awards for the UK channel distributor of the year, at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, Hyde Park London. The finalists include: Crane Telecommunications, DMSL, MTV Telecom, Nessco, Nimans and Westcon Group.

Most people are oblivious to power quality and only really notice fluctuations and pollution when their loads begin to malfunction or fail. Power quality cannot be ignored due to the ever increasing instability of our mains supply.

The Leonardo Power Quality Institute (LPQI) are heavily involved in disseminating information on power quality and how to improve it. They run a number of seminars (of which Riello UPS is just one of their guest speakers) in addition to publishing useful guides - such as The Power Quality Application Guide. This provides a detailed overview on typical power problems and discusses the costs of poor power quality.

For details on the next LPQI seminars click here.

At Riello UPS we have been running our Power Protection and Business Continuity seminars for several years now - the 2007 series kicks off in Leeds at the Royal Armouries on Wednesday 23rd May.

This month we also ventured back into trade shows - Convergence Summit North at the Deansgate Manchester Hilton and Comms Solutions at the New Wembley. These events are now smaller and far more targetted than the heady days of Which Computer at the NEC and the strategy appears to be paying off.

The Riello UPS stands at both events were busy and our competition to win race tickets to the British Grand Prix as part of our Ducati sponsorship package generated a lot of interest. The shows were also our first public unveiling of the new Dialog Vision UPS which was also well received. On the stands we were represented by Chris Loftus and Chris Cutler and early reports are that they did a great job as usual. ‘Lofty’ also managed to find the time to get near the new Wembley pitch!

A recent article in Computer Weekly caught my eye. It reported the growing problems we have been reporting in this blog for some now - how weak the UK electrical infrastructure is and its lack of ability to cope with an ever increasing demand for power.

The ‘Information Age’ has been upon us for some time but I doubt that few people realise the investments being made in data centres to meet our growing expectations for ‘on-demand’ information. Imagine you are a company like Google - your long term plans (which for search engines may only be 3-5 years ahead) must include the development of new data centres to store and process data. But where do you site these ? Now low-cost labour is not your prerequisite but cost of electricity and sustainability of its supply.

The article also highlights that power failures were themselves the fastest growing source of business disruption in the UK last year, with 26% of organisations instigating their business recovery plans due to power failures - up from 7% in 2005. In the UK, as in the rest of Europe the problems of energy supply and management are going to simply worsen because we cannot make the necessary investments.

In the Third World survival depends upon access to water. Will the same hold true for electricity in developed nations in the years to come ?