Data Center World: Flywheel UPS Demonstration

Marton Olsen from Active Power gives a brief demonstration of the company's flywheel UPS system at the Data Center World expo in Las Vegas on April 1, 2008.

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• datacenter
• dcw
• flywheel
• ups
• backup
• power
• datacentre

[mcsemel]

We have one of these units powering our data center. It has been in place since 2002 with a 750 kW generator. We have not had an issue with startup and have not had to supplement it with batteries. It has taken over 250 power events from the grid since it was installed with no effect on the protected equipment. Our UPS has a GenStart unit so the flywheel starts the generator if the UPS detects a loss of grid power.

The $1,000,000 savings coupled with its 7+ year track record speaks for itself.

[roidroid]

i don't know what you just said

[dubyamoney]

@cdzieciolandmisie What!!!!! are you hand cranking it old timer??? the whole point in having the gen set is to ensure continuity, you only have a small 300kw unit, I've just installed a 1.5 Mw unit, I would be shot if it took 15 sec to start!!! PS make sure you have a maintenance regime in place and test it weekly, oh yeah!!! don't forget the fuel!!!

[dubyamoney]

@mcsemel 250 power events??

[bigman55434]

I think you would have a tough time convincing some datacenter owners to place their reliance on 15 seconds of power. If you could beef up that flywheel and get at least 1 minute of power, that gives you a little better window to recover via generator.

[lcabosa]

bateries for cars, flywheels an fuel cells for energy storage, how dificult is to get that ???

[CurtHowland]

@cdzieciolandmisie "that's been sitting for a year or two"

Someone has been cutting corners again.

A mission critical generator should be run tested once a week.

[TOGGI3]

Sometimes, that 5 minutes of backup makes all the difference in customer power failure. Flywheel depends entirely on the system automatically kicking over to generator power. Anything that could possibly make that fail and require manual intervention makes the flywheel system useless.

[TOGGI3]

@Waynebarkr Yeah but what happens when something happens the switchgear doesn't like that requires manual intervention, say abnormal utility power, and it doesn't switch?  Or a generator fails to come up? These things can and do happen.

[Waynebarkr]

@cdzieciolandmisie Not true--a well maintained genset ( if you have one installed in a data center it better be) will start up and take the load in 5 to 8 seconds. Gensets in parallel will start up and parallel in less than 20 seconds.

[cdzieciolandmisie]

a 300kw diesel generator that's been sitting for a year or two takes about a minute of cranking to start up. 15 seconds of power just won't do the trick