Cummins Power Generation (CPG) recently conducted a series of seminars in New Zealand titled “Standby Power Generation: Dispelling the Myths on Reliability”. Held in Auckland and Wellington in early November, over 45 consultants and end users participated in the sessions and workshops.
Emergency and standby power systems have been common in many applications for a number of years and are typically installed to ensure public safety or protect businesses from the financial risks associated with the loss of commercial power. As a result, standby power system design is complex and becoming more so as digital technology requirements increase.
Although extended power failures in Australia and New Zealand are not common, the growing population and demand for power, along with the reduction in reserve capacity of utility service providers is making the cost of standby power more reasonable to facility owners. These factors, combined with recent dramatic regional power failures, weather-related failures, and the increasing cost of even brief power failures, are driving more facilities to incorporate standby power.
Cummins Power Generation recognises the role of engineering a standby system is often not as simple as selecting the most reliable generator set. The standby system always involves protection, power transfer and load management design. Even the simplest of systems may require paralleling, load adding and shedding management and remote starting/ monitoring.
The seminars included topics such as Designing for Dependability, Redundancy versus Reliability and Power Solutions for Blade Servers. Each of the seminars was engineered to provide participants with technical discussions and activities, centred on making the standby system design process simpler and clearer for all.
To add significant value to these workshops, Cummins Power Generation enlisted the support of leading consultancy firm Norman Disney & Young (NDY) and MGE UPS, part of the global Schneider Group, to present workshops.
Craig Wilkins, Sales Director Power Generation points out, “NDY provided significant value in discussing the benefits in generator system dependability through good system design, and combined with MGE discussing UPS impacts, allowed attendees to learn from a couple of different design perspectives.”
The seminars were conducted over a full day with participants signing in at 7.45am and finishing after a heavy day at 4.30pm. Feedback from participants indicated that the sessions were extremely valuable and almost all advised they would attend future sessions.
Birol Guler, General Manager Commercial Gensets added, “These sessions were an excellent opportunity for Cummins Power Generation to continue to build on the current growth in the New Zealand market.”
