PowerSecure International, a provider of technologies to electric utilities and their commercial customers, reports that its end-to-end standby power solution offers a higher degree of reliability than many standby systems that serve the nuclear power industry. Steve Fairfax, president with the consulting firm MTechnology, evaluated data from more than 1,000 sites where the PowerSecure solution was used in both load management and standby power settings over a five year period from 2007 through 2012.
He found that during 5,234 power outage events (excluding outages due to human error or equipment repair situations), which occurred during this period, the PowerSecure solution delivered a 96.1 percent success rate. The data on the reliability of the PowerSecure backup power solution includes more than 50,000 datapoints.
Unlike other approaches to providing backup power, which can include engineering, components, assembly, maintenance and monitoring from different, uncoordinated providers, PowerSecure offers an integrated end-to-end approach, which streamlines design engineering, construction, deployment and monitoring to allow for significant efficiencies.
PowerSecure says its distributed generation business segment has grown by 36 percent in the last 12 months.
Recent weather events in the Northeast have reinforced the need for backup nuclear power reliability. Hurricane Sandy slowed or shut down a half-dozen nuclear plants, and put Exelon’s 43-year-old Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey on “alert” status. Indian Point 3 automatically shut down at one point after the storm as a result of an electrical grid disturbance.