Comparison of Different Solutions for Emergency and Standby Power Systems for Commercial Consumers

In this paper a new improved method to evaluate the design of commercial power systems is described. The power system is divided into seven design criteria and each criterion is evaluated separately. The aim with the method is to identify problems with the present design which can be modified to improve the performance of the system. The method is applied to four sensitive commercial consumers: substation; hospital; voice and data communication facility; and data center. They are all equipped with emergency and standby power systems. Different requirements and solutions for each systems are analyzed and presented. The study shows that the voice and data communication facility and especially the data center both have possibilities of improvements. The data center power systems has a potential to improve the efficiency, and therefore also to reduce the energy cost, improve the availability, and to use the local energy source and energy storage to sell power to the utility grid during peak load