Withstanding Power Outages With a Generator
What do you do when power fails? Do you light candles or do you continue with life uninterrupted with a back-up power supply?
Power Outages Affect Everyone
The electrical grid serves customers ranging from residential to industry (including health care and emergency services). Understanding what the electrical grid is can be useful in determining the factors that contribute to power outages. The basic concept of an electrical grid is:
- Power Generation - Large generators produce high-voltage electricity. Generators can be steam driven (fossil fuel and nuclear plants) and water driven (dams and rivers).
- High Voltage Lines - High voltage is transmitted through these lines to sub-stations.
- Sub-Stations - Receive high-voltage from power plants and step-down voltage using transformers. Routes power to grid associate transformers and poles.
- Poles and Transformers - Transformers receive voltage from sub-station and step down for residential use.
- Industry Substations - Many times factories and industrial facilities have dedicated substations. The substations are equipped with transformers that step-down high voltage to various levels depending on the requirement of the facility.
This is often referred to as our electrical infrastructure. If we viewed the infrastructure as a chain, each link would be a component. As with any chain, when a link is broken the chain fails. Weather is a major contributor to broken links, resulting in power outages. The
United States Department of Energy calculated that in 2016 every American experienced a power loss lasting at least four hours.
Be Proactive by Planning for When an Outage Will Happen
Many factors can cause a power outage. Both nature and human error can result in the destruction of grid components. Whatever the cause, the result is the same - no power. Power generation tranformers, high voltage lines, or sub-stations failures can have long repair times. These failures affect both residential and industry. Extreme weather such as hurricanes and earthquakes are contributors.
Lightning strikes to transformers, destruction to poles, and damage caused by human error cause power outages. Damage is isolated to individual areas on the grid. Repair times are shorter for this type of damage. However, if the damage is widespread, repair time is affected.
Be Pepared with an Emergency Backup Generator
No one has the ability to calculate when a power loss is going to occur. The best defense against power loss is to have an on-site emergency standby generator ready and waiting to be put into service. In most cases, diesel generators are considered to be the best option in the event of a power loss. A residence, factory, hospital or any facility can have a back-up or emergency power system installed to limit the overall rist exposure.
A low hour pre-owned generator set is an affordable solution to any power generation requirement. Generator Source is one of the world's largest used generator providers. Our selection ranges from generators for light commercial applications to large industrial, data-center and hospital facilities. We can help design your system from ground up or upgrade an existing system.
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| 4/16/2018 9:27:57 AM
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