International. The continuity of electrical power for an organization is elementary for all its operations, but there are many businesses that do not measure the problems that a power outage can bring them.
Disruptions are always negative for business, as they often rack up losses of millions of dollars for data centers, financial institutions, industrial plants and other types of operations, and can affect the good reputation that takes years to build.
That's where Schneider Electric warns that it's worth considering how energy management technology and services can reduce such risks for an organization. Advanced features are now available to help operations teams rise to the occasion, avoid potential downtime, and respond to critical events more quickly and effectively.
First of all, the only way to prevent problems is to make sure that all the important points of your power distribution system are being observed 24 hours a day. Smart energy monitoring devices must be located on every head node, from service entry to servers (these can be standalone meters or intelligence built into other types of equipment, such as smart circuit breakers).
Each monitoring point measures, maps and records hundreds of energy parameters and alarms in specific types of risk conditions. Each device shares this information over wired or wireless connections, across different protocols such as Ethernet or other types of connections to local or cloud-based applications. These allow technicians to analyze the state of the electrical distribution network, including deviations from normal operating conditions.
A system of devices, communication connections, hubs and networked software can necessarily become quite extensive. Fortunately, there are new services available that use special analytics to validate whether an energy monitoring network is set up correctly and feeds the appropriate data from each point. These services generally also offer consultations on any discovered conditions that present immediate risks to reliability.
If a power-related mishap can occur, the right people are notified on their mobile devices before the problem has a chance to disrupt any critical equipment. Often, these situations can be resolved quickly and avoid downtime.
If an outage is unavoidable, advanced cause analysis isolates the source of the problem. This could bring other drawbacks such as a problem in power quality, switch trigger, failed power transfer, motor overload or transformer failure, among others. Power event analysis, sequence of events, disturbance direction detection, and power quality analysis are all valuable capabilities in this situation. A power management app can also provide guidance to help technicians determine the appropriate response to manage the impact of the problem and help restore power as quickly as possible.
To prevent recurrences, an energy management system can determine the impact of acute and chronic power system events. It will correlate data from the meter level to the system level, showing the origin of an event and how it spread through the distribution system. The operations team can then take steps to mitigate these conditions and prevent them from disrupting or damaging critical loads and equipment in the future.
Mitigation usually takes the form of energy conditioning equipment. Mission-critical operations, such as data centers and hospitals, will always have an on-site UPS. The AC-to-DC to AC voltage conversion of a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) will inherently filter out a range of power anomalies. However, separate voltage regulation, surge suppression, harmonic filtering or power factor correction systems can also be employed, if necessary.
Event analysis, data collection, guidance and determination of the problems and impacts of power outages are the core functions of Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure(TM) Power, which has helped thousands of critical power operations stay up and running while avoiding power-related downtime.
The EcoStruxure(TM) Power architecture includes a full range of intelligent power management devices, applications and services, offering a complete family of power conditioning solutions.
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