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Maintaining the force of electric energy

Unplanned interruptions due to electrical system faults or power outages can generate heavy losses for business with critical operations: loss of production and services, dangerous shutdowns, expensive energy-intensive restarts and overall loss of revenue.

So says Gys Snyman, vice president for energy efficiency at global specialist in energy management, Schneider Electric South Africa. He believes that infrastructure availability, specific to data centres, is by far the top requirement due to the high cost of downtime.

“In order to avoid unexpected disruptions and damage to sensitive electronic equipment, businesses require reliable power delivery. Unfortunately, utilities do not supply electricity at the level of reliability and availability required by many customer applications,” explains Snyman. “Electrical networks are constantly affected by disturbances, and must be managed efficiently depending on the acceptable levels of energy interruptions in each area.”

Based on this, he says that the key to more efficient energy management lies in asset management, monitoring, architectures and equipment.

Asset management: Regular maintenance and modernisation of the electrical network throughout its life cycle is required to efficiently deliver a reliable energy. Electrical asset management refers to all of the activities to achieve these goals at the best cost compromise in four improvement plans: maintenance (curative and preventive), modernisation (new design study and retrofit), monitoring (predictive maintenance, harmonic measurement, consumption follow-up), and management (information system).

Monitoring: Speedily tracking the propagation of disturbances and isolating problem sources are of critical importance. Electrical distribution (ED) monitoring, alarming, event logging and power quality analysis are management tools geared at optimising power conditions and providing immediate alerts to personnel regarding impending availability problems. If an event occurs, the solution enables users to swiftly troubleshoot specific problems and to get their processes restored quickly.

“By using efficient software, ED network commissioning enables users to start up their ED systems faster and with less labour. To optimise the infrastructure utilisation, ED asset optimisation easily and automatically generates load profiles that can reveal hidden, unused capacity inherent to building, floor, feeder, zone or equipment (such as PDU, rack and machine). It can also provide automated test reports on back-up generation equipment, which will provide users with the confidence that the back up-generation will perform in the event of an outage.”

Architectures and equipment: Either during the design phase or during operation, it is often necessary to install equipment to mitigate the effects of disturbances (internal or external, constant or occasional).

According to Snyman, some equipment such as drives, inverters, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes), arc furnaces, transformers, filters and discharge lamps generate voltage distortion or harmonics. Harmonic filtering reduces and eliminates the harmonics that stress the electrical network that cause outages and potentially diminish equipment reliability and the lifespan of the electrical device.

“For critical application continuity, you must reduce the impact of power outages and prevent downtime. Strategies involving maintaining or ensuring power to critical loads are therefore used by Schneider Electric South Africa. These include critical power architectures based on relevant equipment (such as back-up generation, UPSes and redundant systems), which are designed and installed by our experienced specialists,” says Snyman.

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