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Don’t Sacrifice Power Resilience in Favour of Cost Reductions

UK businesses and organisations are facing record increases in energy prices. While Western Europe is facing a crisis-driven primarily by rapidly increasing wholesale gas prices, energy costs are climbing quicker in the UK than anywhere else. One report from Cornwall Insight has already warned of a further 30% increase in energy prices for the UK in 2022.

For many businesses, finding a way to tackle energy price rises is becoming an increasingly urgent priority. Finding ways to use less power is one fundamental way of doing that, but while better energy efficiency seems like an obvious solution, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t compromise other energy priorities.

Why power resilience is still key

While the Capacity Market and Grid Balancing Services are likely to prevent major outages, spikes in demand could still cause disruption. Constrained local distribution networks are the most likely culprit when it comes to power disruption.

This can be where major new infrastructure, such as on-site generation, could end up backfiring. While generating your own power has the potential to be an ideal solution to rising prices, it can risk further compromising your power resilience. On a constrained grid connection, it can be difficult to feed excess power back to the grid, potentially compromising your site infrastructure.

When it comes to cost-effective energy, short-term savings can quickly pale in comparison to the rapidly mounting costs of power disruption that can derail your day-to-day operations. Even very brief disruption events such as sudden dips or spikes in voltage can result in major disruption when, for example, it causes PLCs to trip and require a reset.

Balancing energy efficiency with reduced costs

A number of solutions exist that are able to deliver better power resilience while also trimming down energy costs. A battery energy storage system (BESS) can solve many of the problems that come with installing other energy infrastructure upgrades. It can be used to store excess power from on-site renewables, or to buffer the significant demand increase that comes with EV charging. What’s more, innovative technology from Powerstar can also provide full site-wide Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to your site in the event of a power disruption, whilst simultaneously supporting renewable generation, EV charging, and other energy applications.

Voltage optimisation is another technology that offers significant cost savings while also improving power resilience across your site. By conditioning incoming voltage, this technology can deliver immediate savings of between 8% and 12% on your overall electricity consumption, in turn reducing carbon emissions and electricity costs, as well as protect equipment from minor disruption such as voltage spikes and the detrimental effects of overvoltage on your electrical equipment.