Power Protection and UPS Blog

We are not the only country suffering severe problems. Earlier this week Barcelona entered a state of emergency as they lost mains power for 2 days due to a substation cable fault. The failure started a chain reaction which lead to a further 6 substations failing and left hospitals and other such institutions reliant on emergency standby power generators and battery back-up systems.

This is just one of those great success stories for Riello UPS. Edinburgh University is installing one of the most advanced super-computers in the UK - named “Hector” this £113m system covers the sized of two tennis courts and is capable of 60,000,000,000,000 calculations per second - BBC report. So, who is protecting this massive investment - Riello UPS with 5MVA of Master Plus UPS. We will have a full case study out shortly and this is just one of several wins for the Master Plus UPS in the datacentre market.

The Tenth Fuel Cell Symposium takes place this September (25-27th) in London at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster. This international forum is the primary UK venue for anyone who wants to catch up with the latest developments in fuel cell technology and its commercialisation.

Riello UPS is already working on several projects in this area. In the UK we have developed a fuel cell powered 1.5kVA Dialog Plus UPS with UPS Systems Plc - (a leading standby power specialist). The system can provide over 4 hours runtime in a fully field serviceable, standalone cabinet system containing the UPS, fuel cell and fuel tray. This project is fascinating because the fuel system (tray) is self-contained - it does not require connection to external hydrogen cannisters. There are also strong financial and environmental reasons to move to this type of UPS system for extended runtimes in secure or remote areas. Using a modular approach the system runtime can easily be extended in 4 hour blocks to 8 hours, 12 hours and more - all we do is increase the U height of the cabinet. Such a system does have a premium price over a traditional battery powered system but this is more than compensated for in reduced footprint and life-time costs of the system.

Eureka Magazine recently published an interesting article on two problems that could arise from the wider adoption of renewable energy sources - voltage stability and angular stability. These particular power problems stem from the long transmission lines that can sometimes be required to take the generated energy (from for example, wind or wave power) to the nearest land point of distribution. Whilst there is no doubt that we need to reduce our reliance on carbon-type fuels, we need to consider the impact of such changes to our distribution network. By making it more complex, and therefore increasing the potential for power failures, we simply move a potential power problem from one hand to the other.

It is a very interesting time in the UPS industry and probably one that is unprecedented. We have Schnieder bringing together two major global brands - MGE UPS and APC - under its corporate umbrella and the creation of a spin-off company MGE OPS. My understanding is that the MGE OPS company was forced into being by the European Commission because control of MGE and APC gave Schneider a monopoly in the sub 10kVA market. The new single-phase UPS company, MGE OPS will almost certainly be purchased in due course by a further global corporate. So what does this mean for Riello UPS ?

Well no-one has a monopoly on customer service. My view is that whilst such moves are made to benefit shareholders, they rarely benefit customers. There is just far too much turmoil as the spoils are split-up and resources (read people) processed into new jobs or convinced that they should seek pastures new.

Provided we at Riello UPS continue to look after our customers and deliver innovative power solutions, we can only benefit from these strategic games - as will all our customers, old and new.