BUGs or Batteries
What does it cost your organization when you lose power?
Is the cost the same for every work area or are there places where continuous operation is critical? Have you identified or ranked the critical work areas?
What is Resilience?
There is a wide range of viewpoints about “resilience”, a term used to describe a way to continue operations during power shutdowns. Some people and organizations are less impacted than others. The least impacted simply tolerate the event suffering at most a case of minor aggravation.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are people and organizations that suffer intolerable financial losses, or in the case of essential government services such as fire and police, lives are at risk.
Is concern for Resilience an issue?
As noted in this 2021 press release published by MCubed, in Northern and Southern California alone, there are now over 23,500 backup-generating systems (also known as BUGs). These systems are capable to produce 12.2 GW or about 15% of California’s total electricity usage. And this doesn’t count the smaller home generators you can buy at a hardware store (or online).
Over 90% of these are diesel-powered, a considerable contradiction to efforts for creating clean air.
Some people must think uninterrupted power is important.
What about the people and organizations that suffer but not to the extent that they can financially justify and maintain backup power generation? Could they benefit from a lower-cost and easier-to-implement solution?
This is the spot in the market where we feel the Respond! Power System has a fit. In addition to the other benefits of the product line, our batteries provide a solution for resilience. If there are a few critical work areas that need resilience, it is not necessary to invest in a backup generation system for your entire facility if you can deploy resilience at the workstation level.
If you need to consider extended outages (increasingly more common in California and elsewhere), there are tactics you can use. You can keep extra charged batteries. You can also do your charging offsite at a location that is not suffering from an outage.
Resilience and Clean Air can both be accomplished.
The value of Resilience might not be obvious
As for your organization, there are two ways to financially consider the value of resilience I will explain. The first is to consider the “cost of the hours lost” when the power is interrupted. Many offices employ relatively high-paid people. When the power goes out, even for a few hours per year, their time is lost as most are using a computer in their work.
The second way to consider the value of resilience is to calculate the “value-added that is lost”. For example, suppose you have a consulting, legal, or similar business where you bill clients by the hour. What is lost in these situations is billable hours, not just the wages and benefits to the employee,
If your top-line revenues are impacted by lost time, I suggest the latter calculation is the better way to assess the benefit you could have from resilience. No matter which way you calculate the costs of power downtime, justification for a resilience solution could be simple.
