Power
Power: Present and future
Powersolve’s Peter Clark highlights price, availability, legislation and efficiency as the key influences affecting power supply purchasing
Powersolve’s Peter Clark explores current power supply trends
The power supply industry is in good shape. Frombasic plug-top chargers and desktop power supplies to inverters for renewable energy projects, demand for power sources has never been higher.
The downside remains the price customers are prepared to pay
for the latest power source and increasing legislation that impacts anything that consumes power. There is also talk of component shortages, so a high stock level ismore important to ensure constant availability.
Themajority of power supply customers, while happy to specify
a standard product, continue to demand performance improvements at lower cost.While size is not generally a key issue sincemany designs now follow industry-standard formats, users are looking for an increasing amount of power froma given ‘package’. Power supplies with densities of 15W/in3
are becoming
common and this should improve as efficiency increases. Percentage efficiency levels in the nineties are now standard for many designs and the race is on to improve this figure across all power supply products as demand tomake better use of energy increases globally.
Manufacturers are continually asked to engineer products that
combine an increase in performance at a lower price. This is particularly true of external power supplies which represent the highest volume of the power supply sector. These are the plug-top and desktop units which power laptops and chargemobile phones, tablets, cameras and so on. Legislation is having a significant impact on power supplymanufacturers in this area.
30 | June 2011
Such legislation is aimed at saving power and should have a positive effect on our environment: which is good.
The key legislative programme is Energy Star which emerged in
the USA around 14 years ago. Energy Star began as a voluntary labelling programdesigned to identify and promote energy- efficient products to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Computers andmonitors were the first labelled products. Today, Energy Star labels are now found on appliances, office equipment, lighting, home electronics andmore. An increasing number of power supplies ‘designed tomeet the requirements of the Energy Star programme’ are also reaching themarket.
Energy Star provides a systemfor power supplymanufacturers to
designate theminimumefficiency performance of an external power supply. This so-called international efficiencymark corresponds to specificminimumactive and no-load efficiency levels and productmeeting these criteria is clearlymarked. In theory, only product tested tomeet the requirements of the various levels of Energy Star can be sold inmany parts of the world.
The latest iteration, which we will all have tomeet soon, is
Energy Level V, which not only demands a no-load or standby power level of 0.3Wfor power supplies below 50Wand 0.5Wfor those from50 to 250W, but also demands that units that produce 100Wormoremust have a true power factor of 0.9 or greater at 100 per cent of rated load.
Clearly, designing and building power supplies tomeet the rise in
legislation costs themanufacturermoney and,with increasing global competition, it is not always possible to recover that costwhen selling the product. However,we all have to comply, so Powersolve is looking at otherways to differentiate itself. Thus, the company majors on product availability and looks to provide customerswith power supplies in the shortest possible time, every time.
www.powersolve.co.uk www.electronics-sourcing.co.uk
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