The installation of generators is the most common solution for backup power. While the modern generator is highly reliable, the use of multiple generators for critical applications offers the ability to provide redundancy to allow for maintenance or failure. Moreover, paralleling systems provide the capability to increase total capacity while also ensuring uninterrupted backup power protection during maintenance or the failure of a single generator.

Furthermore, since many weather-related power outages are far more widespread, this typically impacts the time to restore the utility power infrastructure. Therefore, intelligent power management systems, which are the nexus of a paralleling system, should also be able to optimize resources while on backup generator power to meet varying load demands. This can help increase fuel runtime autonomy while still ensuring uninterrupted power to the most critical loads.

Julius Neudorfer is the CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies, Inc. Based in Westchester NY, NAAT’s clients include Fortune 500 firms and government agencies. NAAT has been designing and implementing data center infrastructure and related technology projects for the last 25 years. He is a member of AFCOM, ASHRAE, IEEE, iMasons and The Green Grid. He is also an instructor for the US Department of Energy “Data Center Energy Practitioner” “DCEP” program. He developed and holds a US patent for a high efficiency cooling system for rack mounted computer equipment. Julius writes the “Hot Aisle Insight” column at Mission Critical Magazine, and has also written numerous articles and whitepapers for various IT and data center publications and has presented seminars and webinars on data center power, cooling and energy efficiency.