FEATURE UPS & STANDBY POWER
Cutting carbon emissions with modular UPS B
y 2025, the average person will interact with a connected device
around 4,800 times every day – that’s once every 18 seconds. Our day to day lives are fast becoming dominated by the ‘Internet of Things’ and interconnected devices constantly transmitting data. This increased demand for storage and
processing places additional strain not just on the data centres that provide such capacity, but on our ailing electricity network too. With the National Grid struggling to cope
as a consequence of decades of underinvestment, it’s not as simple as cranking up electricity generation to keep up with this growing demand. It needs data centre managers to do more with less, a scenario that places energy efficiency firmly in the spotlight. As it stands, data centres already
consume over 3 per cent of the world’s total electricity and produce 2 per cent of our planet’s CO2 emissions, the same impact as the entire aviation industry. Energy costs can account for up to 60 per cent of a data centre’s overall overheads too, so cutting waste and improving efficiency aren’t just ‘desirable’, they’re absolutely essential. Air conditioning technology and
techniques have improved significantly in recent years. But these gains alone won’t be enough. Fortunately another key element of a data centre’s infrastructure, its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), offer potential for sizeable savings too.
MOVING TO MODULAR UPS Until recent years, a UPS was typically a large, static unit only capable of optimal efficiency when carrying heavy loads of 80-90 per cent. In a lot of cases, capacity was oversized during initial installation to deliver the required redundancy, so many UPSs were wasting vast amounts of energy because they were continuously running low, inefficient loads.
Moving to energy efficient modular uninterruptible power supplies offers both environmental and economic benefits, says Chris Cutler of power management specialist Riello UPS
But just as cooling equipment has
developed, so too has UPS technology. Modular systems replace these sizable standalone units with compact individual rack-mount style power modules, which can be paralleled together to provide capacity and redundancy. These modern UPSs deliver performance, efficiency, scalability, and ‘smart’ interconnectivity far beyond the capabilities of their predecessors. By enabling capacity to closely correspond to the actual load requirements, the risk of oversizing is removed, cutting both power consumption and energy waste. The principle of modularity also gives IT managers the flexibility to ‘pay as you grow’ by adding in extra power modules as and when they need to. Such scalability minimises the initial investment and makes the total cost of ownership far more manageable. Transformerless modular UPS units
generate far less heat than static, transformer-based versions, while they
also require significantly less air conditioning too. They’re smaller and lighter, so have a substantially reduced footprint, and are easier to maintain because each individual module is ‘hot swappable’ and can be replaced when required without the whole system having to go offline.
SIGNIFICANT COST SAVINGS We recently upgraded the UPSs installed in two data centres owned by one of the country’s largest consumer goods suppliers. Its existing power protection system was originally installed in 2007. Made up of transformer-based 400 and 800 kVA units operating inefficiently at low loads ranging from 12-25 per cent, overall UPS efficiency averaged 92 per cent - just 89 per cent in the main switchroom – resulting in huge amounts of energy being wasted. As the large units generated such significant amounts of heat, air conditioning costs were considerable. Around 414 kW of energy was needed just for cooling, resulting in an annual bill of more than £315,000. These dated and inefficient units were
replaced with our transformerless modular Multi Power UPS. As the system was more closely configured to the load requirements of the two data centres, UPS efficiency has rocketed from 92 to 96 per cent. The total cost for running the UPS and
air conditioning at both sites has been slashed by an astonishing £335,000 a year. Cooling alone has been cut by almost 72 per cent, producing yearly savings of 297.3 kW. Overall energy savings add up to just under 1.25 million kWh, enough electricity to power 316 average homes for a year. Carbon emissions in both data centres have also reduced from 2,147kg to 603.5kg, a drop of 71.89 per cent. For any data centre manager in the
position of replacing their existing UPS in the short to medium-term, upgrading to modular UPS is an obvious choice. Not only do they get reliability, they’ll reap the rewards of enhanced energy efficiency, with all the obvious benefits to their day to day energy costs.
Riello
riello-ups.co.uk
42 NOVEMBER 2018 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
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