Analysis of electric power architectures to improve availability and efficiency of air conditioning systems

This paper analyzes different power supply architectures with the objective of mitigating efficiency and availability deficiencies in air conditioning systems for telecom and IT applications. The paper emphasizes the importance of running air conditioners with variable speed drives and discusses why DC power architectures seem to be more adequate than those with AC power. The analysis shows that well-configured microgrid-based power plants may improve both availability and energy efficiency without compromising cost. Microgrid-based design without combined heat and power (CHP) technologies might be a good compromise solution because although they may not be as good as configurations with CHP in terms of energy efficiency and cost, they could be implemented with more modular designs and they may achieve higher availability.