Consulting-Specifying Engineer - April 2008 - (Page 14) M/E Roundtable by data centers and other digital economy users. Many utility customers can tolerate brief sags and outages and it would be unreasonable to place the cost burden of business continuity on the broader population of users. COOK: The grid provides bulk power, the distribution system provides local power. Power quality problems can be addressed at the distribution system level. Work on the grid should be focused on reliability (continuity of service). There are lots of solutions to power quality issues (sags and surges) that can be applied to individual loads up to entire distribution feeders. CSE: How must the situation change? COOK: Utilities are already encouraged to improve their performance (reliability and power quality) through the regulatory process. Individual facilities can apply local solutions if their already high level of reliability and power quality is not high enough. PERKINS: Businesses will become creative in how they manage their power reliability needs. We know of one utility that offers high availability “premium power” service to several customers. In this case, the utility arranged for financing of high-efficiency UPS equipment from a third party institution, installed the UPS systems at the customer’s facility, and is recouping the cost through the premium utility rate that it charges to the customer. Others with a need for continuous power will provide for their own power security via UPS and generator, through the use of on-site generation in parallel with the grid or a combination thereof. On-site combined-heatand-power systems provide opportunities for reliability improvement and long-term energy savings. CSE: Does electric grid unreliability have an impact on power system designs for buildings? PERKINS: Enterprise class data centers have historically led the way in providing for their own power system availability. Large financial institutions, hosting centers, etc., have continuous power requirements and rely extensively on highly redundant power systems including redundant UPS systems and emergency generators. For these customers, there has recently been more attention placed on how system redundancy impacts energy consumption and cost, so the cost of reliability has gained some attention, but in all other respects attention to reliability has been business as usual. Input #209 at csemag.com/quickResponse 14 Consulting-Specifying Engineer • APRIL 2008 http://www.sens-usa.com http://www.sens-usa.com http://csemag.com/quickResponse
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