Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

The winter months are always challenging, often causing difficult driving conditions, heating system issues, increased incidents of illness and generally a higher level of discomfort and, of course, more frequent power outages.  All of these can have a negative impact on businesses’ ability to function optimally.

In fact, this week has been a difficult one in many areas across mid-Michigan, with windy conditions knocking down trees and branches across many counties, knocking out power for thousands.

Monday evening, however, an outage impacting nearly 9,000 customers in Montcalm, Gratiot, and Isabella counties and leaving them without power from 6:02pm Monday to 1:36am Tuesday. 

According to a Consumers Energy media representative, a failed insulator caused a transformer bank and a transmission substation to go down.  The insulator is a device on the cross arm of a power pole that separates energized and non-energized equipment.  The separation is critical, as contact with energized equipment can instantly cause damage to whatever initiates the contact, damaging the equipment and causing an outage. 

There are countless incidents each year of outages caused by animals and other wildlife coming into contact with energized equipment, knocking out power to businesses and residents, despite best efforts to prevent them.

“Sometimes, equipment fails, and it causes the outage,” the Consumers Energy rep told the Morning Sun News.

Utilities do what they can to prevent outages but aren’t always successful.  As such, it’s incumbent on businesses to protect their own assets, assuming outages will happen.  With each outage – and even with small surges that don’t cause outages – powered equipment, including servers, routers and switches, phone systems, and other technology are susceptible to damage. 

What many business leaders don’t consider is that every surge can weaken the circuits that allow equipment to function and, eventually, they will break completely, taking business operations connected to those resources offline, requiring potentially expensive repairs or replacement on top of the down time while the cause of the interruption is discovered.

The easiest solution is a properly sized power protection and UPS system.  They be installed in a number of configurations to meet specific business needs and can be used in a variety of capacities.  Some can deliver power long enough for infrastructure to be properly shut down, while other can provide power for a longer period, leaving operational capabilities intact for a period.  If lengthy outages are a concern, though, backup generator systems may also be required, in conjunction with power protection systems.