• • • UPS + STANDBY POWER • • •
Balancing energy efficiency and power resilience
Simon Port, head of design and engineering at Powerstar, offers insight into battery storage technologies and modern energy management to bolster energy resilience with the efficiency and flexibility needed in today’s complex energy landscape
U
ninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) provides vital protection when Grid supply is disrupted. As energy becomes more distributed and with global security issues and volatile pricing, traditional UPS solutions appear inefficient, costly, and unsustainable. Energy security was brought front and centre in Ukraine, leading to an energy crisis impacting the UK’s commercial competitiveness. Meanwhile, the UK has legally binding net zero targets, and the global energy transition brings its own issues for energy security and reliable power supply.
As businesses with a critical need for UPS, such as data centres; precision manufacturers; pharmaceutical and chemical companies, and defence organisations consider their emergency power demands, the advanced protection offered by modern, sophisticated energy management technology offers numerous additional benefits – for greater efficiency and affordability - across the energy transition.
While security has always been a priority, the energy transition creates new issues for reliable power. Demand grows as we become an increasingly electrified country and, as the energy mix becomes more complex, the risk of power disruption grows.
Overall demand for electricity is predicted to increase by 50% by 2035. With Industry 4.0, more and more processes are digitised and, for business, even brief disruptions to power supply – dips or surges in voltage or brownouts – can cause lengthy periods of downtime and damage. For the
foreseeable future, the UK’s energy mix will only exacerbate these threats. Wind and solar are clean, cheap, and secure in the sense that they can circumvent the geopolitical issues associated with reliance on other countries for power supply. However, renewables are inherently inflexible – when temperatures rose above 30°C for the first time this summer, the UK’s longest run of energy supply without coal-fired generation ended when the National Grid requested that Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station be brought online to ensure security of supply. One of the main factors behind this decision was low wind generation.
Associated with the increase in renewables are issues of distributed power generation. The National Grid was designed for centralised energy dispatch, from large, usually coal-fired power stations.
While this was reliable, the need to decarbonise and drive the energy transition means a shift to a model of smaller generators across distribution networks. Smaller scale generation, including on- site solar or wind turbines, connects to the Grid at the distribution network level, unlike the large- scale plants connected to the high-voltage transmission network.
This puts localised distribution infrastructure under much greater stress than originally envisaged. Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) must balance incoming and outgoing power which can lead to massive variations in supply and demand, putting strain on the infrastructure and increasing the risk of power disruptions.
As demand spikes and the UK’s electricity needs continue to grow, the Grid is under tremendous pressure, increasing reliance on volatile gas markets for necessary baseload generation. With higher energy costs in a volatile market and an increasingly digitised world, traditional standalone UPS for emergency power becomes untenable.
In the energy transition, the demand for more sophisticated energy management solutions is growing: for affordable supply through better management of the energy mix; for the effective use of on-site renewables to minimise emissions, and for business-critical security of supply. UPS is vital for emergency power, but the traditional solution involves expensive, unnecessary energy usage and associated, equally unnecessary emissions. Traditional options rely on lead-acid battery technology which, while preventing power disruption from impacting individual pieces of equipment, has major drawbacks.
The UPS will largely sit idle, yet continually switches from AC to DC, losing up to 15% capacity. For a typical 1MW system, this can equate to around £200,000 in unnecessary annual energy spend.
And proper maintenance is vital. Given that it
serves no purpose other than emergency power, this leads to either maintenance costs which may be wholly unnecessary – yet too risky to avoid – or discovering that the UPS doesn’t work at the time when it is needed. Arguably, this is the very definition of a sunk asset. For greener, cleaner energy, alongside reduced spend, a modern Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) with UPS capability presents a far more dynamic, intelligent, and versatile solution to the issue of emergency power, capable of protecting an entire site with a capacity loss of around one percent – a massive reduction compared to traditional UPS. Where security, affordability, and flexibility must be balanced alongside sustainability, each aspect of energy management is enhanced by investment in BESS technology. For one Powerstar client, a global aerospace manufacturer, energy security was their top priority as precision manufacturing processes were being compromised by power disruptions. Each incident halted production, meaning the destruction of around eight material blocks per year, with each one costing more than £150,000. Powerstar’s recommendation and the subsequent installation of a bespoke 1MW BESS with fast switching and control software has
32 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • NOVEMBER 2023
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50
