Energy storage evolving technologies for protecting larger-scale critical loads

During the last decade, every growth industry from auto assembly to semiconductor fabrication has spent billions of dollars on industrial automation hardware to improve product quality and increase productivity. This, coupled with plant consolidations, has created a growing concern over the impact of a utility power problem that affects the "at risk" or "in-process" value of the business. In many critical process industrial businesses, there is a belief that utility power providers have not kept pace with the supply of quality power. In fact, most utilities have spent millions of dollars to improve their quality of supply. Today's sophisticated electrical loads require that the utility service be customized to provide an electrical power source matched to the needs of the load. For the most critical load businesses, the mitigation of utility power problems is a "site-by-site" decision. The characteristics of the utility distribution system, geographic location and weather conditions dictate the appropriate solution. This presentation shows the advances in power electronics that have made energy storage options available to large load (greater than 2 MW) users to improve power quality.