Electrex Industrial’s recent installation of an emergency power supply for Kuka Systems North America has already earned its keep. With potential losses of more than $10,000 an hour and a minimum of five hours getting everything back online, the backup system put in by Electrex has kept Kuka’s vital Sterling Heights, Mich., data center up and running during two outages in the last few months.
According to a study from the Consortium for Electrical Infrastructure in a Digital Society (CEIDS) the U.S economy loses upward of $100 billion per year just to short-term blackouts. Despite an estimated average cost of $642,000 per incident many smaller industrial and medium-sized manufacturers have insufficient emergency power generator backup in place, especially in critical data centers.
As growth in the U.S. manufacturing is set to outpace the GDP, increasing dependence on ever-expanding data centers means companies like Electrex Industrial are needed to ensure manufacturers and their suppliers have electricity to power vital data centers and computer systems even when the grid goes down.
After suffering five unplanned outages beyond the 25-minute threshold of its emergency power supply, Kuka Systems North America needed to implement new protections for its main data center or risk hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable losses due to downtime.
“We met with five different electrical contractors about installing a new generator as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the network,” said Nick Consiglio, Kuka Systems N.A. senior network engineer. “Ultimately, Electrex Industrial stood out above all the companies we talked with because they consulted with us on our exact needs and all the options available.” He went on to explain that the previous UPS solution provided less than 30 minutes of backup power. Their battery- powered system had been sufficient for more than a decade with only two or three outages lasting beyond that limit.
According to the CDEIS study from 2001, industrial and manufacturing businesses lost more than $45 billion due to unplanned power outages. In recent years this figure has only increased as the digital economy has made companies more dependent on electrical power and demands on the grid have taxed it to the limit.
“Then over the last year we had five unplanned outages that took the network down. Each time that means waiting for the power to be restored and then at least 5 hours to get the system back online,” said Consiglio. “If we’re out of business here then all of our five offices in Michigan plus offices in Brazil, Mexico, and dozens of engineers in the field around the world, are out of business too
