The BBC are running a power failure in Africa competition which closes on 31st October 2005. They want to hear from people whose lives have be changed by power failure.

We seem to be heading for an energy crisis this winter as a result of negative NAO conditions. The prediction is that there will be power cuts as fuel for power stations is used to heat homes rather than power industry.

Sam Orton - one of our sales team came across a briefing by Malcolm Pittwood the Energy Manager at FHP ESS who provides interesting comment on the UK fuel crisis three decades ago and how much we use energy today. Malcolm provides some interesting insights and figures such as the fact that within a decade building energy usage has increased by 65%!

On the subject of fuel crisis here is an interesting blog on the UK Treasury’s Tax Policy on fuel.

Here’s another example of a complete power loss. This time over 19,000 people were affected in Stratford and because of wet weather, engineers from Central Networks could not complete the repairs till the next day. The piece was in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald - “THOUSANDS of properties across Stratford district were plunged into darkness on Wednesday 12th October after a power line came down on the A46 between Stratford and Billesley. Electricity suppliers Central Networks said 19,000 customers lost power for about an hour at around 7pm. Stratford was blacked out and the Royal Shakespeare Company had to to cancel its permformances. Because of the wet weather engineers were unable to complete repairs and the A46 remained closed overnight. It was expected to be reopened later on Thursday”.

Here is another example of an overhead electrical storm causing a power failure and disruption to operations. This time at Heriot-Watt University. Power Failure at Edinburgh Campus: Following the major power failure earlier today, caused by storm damage off campus, power has now been fully reinstated to the Edinburgh Campus. The Campus has been open as normal since Tuesday 11 October. However, there has been some disruption to the delivery of computing services and to the University website.

We just came across this notice from the Central Computing Services at Birkbeck University London. On Sunday 25 September there was a dramatic failure of their uninterruptible power supply which took out power to most of the servers. We do not know what type of UPS technology they are using but an on-line UPS is designed to fail safely to mains as it has a built-in automatic bypass. In case of UPS overload or failure this transfers the load(s) to the mains supply. On-line UPS from about 8kVA upwards can also be put in parallel/N+1 configurations to bring more resilience.

In this blog there is a discussion on what happened to TV reception in Cambridge when it appears that the power went down.

Just how serious can a power failure be. Well here is another article collected from the internet on a power failure in a hospital and the problems that ensued when the back up generator failed - St George’s Hospital Tooting.