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This afternoon a power outage in San Francisco affected the 365 Main St. data center. In the process of 6 cascading outages, one of the outages was not protected and reset systems in many of the colo facilities of that building. - DNS servers lost power and did not properly come back up. This has been resolved after about an hour of downtime and may have caused issues for many GNi customers that would appear as network issues

Data center developer and operator 365 Main Inc. has issued detailed information regarding the root cause behind why back-up power generators in the company's San Francisco facility failed to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40 percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up to 45 minutes.

Data center developer and operator 365 Main Inc. has issued detailed information regarding the root cause behind why back-up power generators in the company's San Francisco facility failed to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40 percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up to 45 minutes.

A microgrid senses the quality of the power flowing through the grid. In the event of an outage, it can disconnect from the grid at a moment's notice. It can also leverage solar, wind, or stored energy to supplement a dip in the current power sup...

Various departments at a car manufacturing plant are suffering from regular process outages due to voltage dips. These dips are causing production losses in the Metal Operation, Spray Coating, and Assembly departments that directly affect the productivity of the plant. The cost of those losses is directly related to the profile of the voltage dip (duration and depth). Various options to reduce these costs are investigated, with particular emphasis upon the Spray Coating and Assembly departments. The following conclusions can be drawn: 1. The number and type of dips occurring at the point of connection of the plant is regular. It is similar to what is monitored at other medium voltage stations that have the same grid structure. 2. A detailed analysis of the spray coating process reveals that installing a 'restart on the fly' system on the large conditioning fans substantially reduces the related voltage dip losses. 3. A detailed analysis of the Assembly department shows that there are two main bottlenecks that determine the restart time after a dip (the 'Drive' sub-process and the 'Cockpit', 'Marking', and 'Transport chain' users). These bottlenecks can be removed by installing a Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR), which results in a payback time of 1.4 years. * 1 Introduction

A week after a slew of popular Web sites were knocked offline temporarily by a power outage in San Francisco, the data center for the Web sites has finally disclosed what went wrong. Basically, backup generators made by a Dutch company called Hitec failed to work, according to an update posted to the Web site of data center 365 Main. Here's what happened: transformer breakers at a San Francisco Pacific Gas & Electric power station unexpectedly opened, causing a power surge that cut off electricity to a portion of the city. (PG&E does not know why the breakers opened.) Three out of 10 of 365 Main's 2.1-megawatt backup generators failed to start up, cutting power to equipment of more than 40 percent of the data center's customers for up to 45 minutes.

A vision... from the past... and the future...

The problem is at least recognised, instead of declaring it a myth. But the video remains a concept. The numbers are not worked out, nor the economics. And while variability can be reduced by combining different renewables, nobody knows whether we will get it right 95, 99 or the current 99.9% of the time. 30 minutes of outage per year does not leave much margin for error.

Alpha Energy recently introduced its enhanced integrated solar power uninterruptible power supply. "As a UPS, the Solaris is the ideal solution for people or organizations wanting to minimize their carbon footprint, but have a critical power need. The Solaris lets you take advantage of free and clean solar power, and at the same time you can rest assured that in the event of a power outage, a supply of that solar energy is available for future use." The Solaris is a single-box solution providing up to 3.5kW of continuous power.