In the UK (and many other parts of the world) February is famed for one thing – and one thing only ………valentines day!

Not much else happens in the second month of the year except that one day where people who are married (or in long-term partnerships) frantically search in last minute haste for a card (or some kind of token) for the ‘better half’ while those who are single (or dating) excitedly listen out for the familiar sound of the letter box. For others it may be just another day to forget. Whatever it means to you, you can’t fail to notice it.

This February is special for Riello UPS; we have our own exciting alliance going on. It’s not so much a marriage as a consolidation of 14 years of integrating Riello UPS and AROS Engineering. Further details will be announced in due course but for UPS customers and business partners, it brings all of the manufacturing and marketing resources of the two companies into a single, leading, world-class UPS supplier. All UPS products (including those previously sold under the AROS name) will be marketed worldwide under the Riello UPS brand and all solar inverter products will be sold under the AROS Solar Technology brand.

Riello’s branding will become Riello AROS UPS. More details will be announced later. Please visit our press centre for more information in due course.

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.