You would have to be a rover on Mars not to know that fuel prices are going through the roof in the UK. Link this to the high rises we have experienced in metals over the last year and you can suddenly see why battery management and UPS efficiency are becoming hot topics in the world of power protection. Most people consider batteries to be a source of standby power for an uninterruptible power supply. The truth is that they are no different in analogy to the fuel rods in a nuclear power station. They are integral to the process, requiring efficient management and safe testing and disposal. The last five to ten years have seen huge volumes of uninterruptible power supplies shipped into markets across the world. This means that there are now literally millions of UPS batteries close to failure. In fact many may already be there but the UPS is not sophisticated enough to know this. Think about the image with this entry and ask yourself how near to empty are your batteries? The only way to tell is to test them in anger during your next mains power failure or take a preventative action and instigate onsite UPS battery testing. The latter approach could literally save you thousands in lost downtime and help prevent your own ‘local’ energy crisis. As our current advertising campaign states ‘it only takes one second to crash your network’.

I came across a piece the other day in The Peninsula, Qatar’s leading English Daily, covering the harnessing of solar power. The article is on a French engineer, Olivier Boegner, whose passions are solar power and sailing. Now I had never considered solar power anything but a secondary standby power system. Here we have it as the prime one. With a little research I then came across the MW-Line company in Switzerland who have been making solar powered boats for several years - the one shown runs for less than 1Euro per day which is simply just quite staggering. I think that the downside will off course be speed when compared to traditional fossil fuelled engines. However, with engineers like Olivier pushing the boundaries (and attempting ventures like a planned British Channel crossings), this technology and application will continue to mature.

In terms of power protection I think that we will see a merging of battery and solar power technologies for buildings in the future to create a central storage of electrical energy. From this ‘local pool’ electrical devices will be able to draw their standby power. This has implications not just for Uninterruptibe Power Supplies but any back-up device. It will provide building engineers with a central maintenance point for standby power and provide a host of benefits - the only downside is that there is still no cheaper energy store than a battery, and especially the sealed lead acid maintenance-free type.

I read recently that though solar power installations have been growing at over 35% a year since 1998, the installed global base still only represents 0.1% of total global electricity generation. Whilst the UK has been a  slow developer in terms of installed Photo Voltaic (PV) installations, it is actually a leader in the technology which it exports to sunnier climates. The UK market is now also expected to grow more rapidly to over 3.2MW per annum as a result of the the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s (BERR’s) Low Carbon Buildings Programme and Local (and Regional) Authorities new building requirements for a significant proportion of building energy to come from renewable sources. Riello UPS has repsonded to this emergent side of the power protection market with its Helios Inverter range with more developments to come from its research & development team in the future.