Advanced Capabilities, Standardized: Scale’s Enhanced Reliability Solutions

Electricity reliability issues are a growing – and increasingly costly – headache for U.S. businesses. Between hurricanes, wildfires, nor’easters, derechos, and an aging grid, almost every region of the country has experienced a year with 8 or more hours of outages in recent memory, with the national average of annual outage hours hitting the highest level in over a decade. And as automation spreads across more and more industries, even brief outages or power quality issues can result in disruptions costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Scale’s advanced microgrids offer enhanced reliability features that provide a high-tech answer to the mounting costs of an aging utility grid, with performance that goes far beyond traditional backup generators. We have also standardized the design and delivery of these systems, enabling us to affordably offer capabilities that would typically require expensive, time-consuming custom engineering. 

With an extensive track record of providing ultra-high uptime power solutions for both grid-connected and off-grid systems, Scale’s industry-leading engineering team has earned the trust of customers ranging from college campuses to cold storage facilities to data centers. So, if the grid is endangering your bottom line, Scale can flip that equation on its head with advanced microgrids that turn reliability challenges into competitive advantages. 

What is Reliability Worth?

In the past, electricity reliability challenges were often treated as a fact of life, or simply a cost of doing business: you could either trust that your utility would provide reliable-enough power, or else install a diesel backup generator. But in many industries, that approach is increasingly outdated. 

As core processes in manufacturing, logistics, food processing, and other industries become automated, even outages lasting just a few seconds – before a diesel backup generator can ramp up – can result in cascading disruptions to operations that last hours, adding up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per incident. As a result, many companies are starting to quantify just how much electricity outages cost them. 

To provide a sense of the magnitude of these losses, recent surveys by ABB and Siemens have found unexpected downtime costs of over $100,000/hour for many types of industrial facilities. Scale’s discussions with customers attest to this, with some citing estimated costs from routine power outages totaling over a million dollars a year from a single facility.

These are striking numbers – but where do they come from? The costs of outages can be considered as a combination of both direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are more obvious, and include:

• Lost revenues from production delays, missed transactions, etc.
• Loss of product due to spoilage or damages
• Lost productivity from wages paid to idled employees
• Cost to recover, including repairs, overtime/contractor pay, and replacement equipment

Indirect costs, on the other hand, are incurred downstream of the outage and may be harder to quantify – but they can be just as great, if not greater. These include: 

• Supply chain disruptions that create ripple effects with partners and customers
• Expediting fees to make up for lost time and shipments
• Penalties for failing to meet Service Level Agreements or compliance standards
• Reputational damage from erosion of customer trust

These add up to costs of outages that vary by industry and by outage duration. For automated warehouses, an hourlong power outage can lead to cascading delays, SLA penalties, and angry customers. For food processors, the loss of temperature control and pressurization in clean rooms for a few minutes can require entire batches to be thrown out. And for the precise manufacturing processes used to produce goods like injection-molded plastics or chemicals, the loss of power for just seconds in the middle of a production run can mean not only losing product but losing hours of time to clean out and recalibrate sensitive equipment. 

Given this one-two punch of more frequent outages and steeper costs per incident, many businesses are working to better understand the impacts of electricity reliability on their bottom line – and the U.S. Department of Energy offers an excellent resource to help. The Customer Damage Function Calculator created by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL) offers a methodical process for generating realistic facility-specific estimates, with inputs including fixed costs, spoilage costs, and how incremental costs accrue over time.

Scale’s Enhanced Reliability Solutions

Developing this type of detailed estimate of your outage costs can shed light on the magnitude and urgency of the reliability challenges your company (or your tenant’s company) faces. But when it comes to determining the best-fit reliability solution for a customer, we like to break it down into two simple questions: 

1. How sensitive are your operations to power outages? For example: 

• Do brief interruptions to certain processes result in wasted materials or degradation of services? 
• Are there critical environmental management systems which need to run continuously? 
• Do all IT or controller-based systems already have their own batteries or UPS systems, or are they vulnerable to disruption from power quality issues?

2. How long should your outage protection last? For example:

• Do you have systems that must run hourly or daily to avoid spoilage or other financial losses (e.g. cold storage)? 
• What is the financial impact of an unexpected multi-hour facility shutdown? What about a multi-day shutdown?
• Do you currently have backup generators on-site? How much of your load do they cover?
• If you have diesel generators, how much fuel is stored on-site and how often is it replaced? 

For both questions, locational factors can also be relevant. When it comes to sensitivity, it’s important to know whether your local distribution grid suffers from power quality issues, which can disrupt operations even without causing an outright outage. And when it comes to the duration of outage protection, some areas face much higher risks of extended outages – most notably California, where wildfires, as well as public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events to prevent wildfires, have resulted in multi-day regional outages in recent years.

Fast Response Capabilities

If a facility’s operations are sensitive to short power outages, Scale’s advanced microgrids with integrated battery storage can be configured to provide an ultra-fast transition to backup power as a standard option. 

To understand how this works, let’s zoom in on what happens to a facility’s operations when a fault occurs on the utility grid. The voltage and/or frequency of the facility’s power supply begin to drop, tripping the main breaker and isolating (or “islanding”) the facility from the grid – at which point frequency and voltage fall precipitously. All of this occurs within the blink of an eye, about 100 milliseconds or less.

What happens next depends on what type of backup power the facility has. 

A natural gas backup generator, even an automated system with basic microgrid controls, will typically take 30 seconds or more to start, ramp up, close the breaker, and begin powering the facility. An older diesel generator requiring manual startup can add several more minutes in the dark.

This is called an “open” transition, because the facility completely loses power for a period of time – and potentially enough time to disrupt manufacturing processes or other operations, require equipment restarts, and otherwise cost time and money. 

Battery storage, by contrast, doesn’t rely on a mechanical “ramping up” process. Instead, batteries utilize solid-state power electronics that can detect a failure and transition to full load support in milliseconds, not seconds. Scale’s controls expertise harnesses that speed to deliver a transition to backup power far faster than any fossil fuel generator can manage – so fast that the facility never fully loses power, and instead just experiences a “blip” in voltage and frequency. 

These “closed” transitions are fast enough to prevent disruptions to operations in food production facilities, manufacturing plants, and other facilities that rely on mechanical processes and equipment. And for power quality-sensitive electronic equipment like industrial control systems, we can incorporate device-specific UPS systems to ensure total ride-through for all of your operations. 

Other companies can provide this level of “closed” transition capabilities, but only through costly, time-intensive custom engineering and static transfer switches. At Scale, our engineering and design expertise lets us deliver it faster and more affordably as a standard feature for our advanced microgrids. 

Multi-Resource, Extended-Duration Backup 

Enhanced reliability also means being able to power through extended outages lasting a day or more. As with traditional backup power solutions, Scale’s advanced microgrids with unlimited duration backup power still require a fuel-based source of generation – whether one of our low-emission natural gas generators or your existing generator (including diesel generators).

However, thanks to our expertise in controls programming for multi-resource, advanced microgrids, we can co-optimize the dispatch of solar and battery storage along with the generator to reduce fuel costs and lower emissions. 

So, for example, if an outage hits in the early morning, the microgrid would dispatch the battery first, then rely on solar to power the facility and recharge the battery during the daytime; in the evening, power would be provided by the remaining battery capacity before switching over to the generator to recharge the battery and power through the night and early morning, when the cycle repeats. By switching between resources as necessary, we can provide unlimited duration backup while minimizing the use of the generator and maximizing its efficiency. 

If you don’t need to plan around multi-day outages or don’t want to install a fuel-based generator as part of your system, our intelligent dispatch and design can also deliver extended, multi-hour backup from solar and storage or even storage-only systems, particularly if you have non-essential loads that we can shed.

In this case, during that same example outage, the battery and solar would work in tandem to provide power through the early evening, at which point non-essential loads would be shed and critical loads would be powered by the remaining battery storage. In the middle of the night, power would be lost for a few hours until solar generation ramps back up, recharging the battery and restoring the facility in stages, starting with critical loads. 

Your Reliability Partner

Our advanced microgrids deliver more benefits than just enhanced reliability. The integration of solar and battery storage provides sustainability benefits along with optimized cost savings, as Scale’s microgrid controls can dispatch the battery to maximize the use of solar and avoid drawing on the grid during those hours of the day, month, and year when utility prices are highest. 

These easy-to-see, “blue sky” cost savings that show up on monthly utility bills are highly valued by most customers. However, as this discussion shows, for many companies our enhanced reliability capabilities can generate even greater value, whether from avoiding the impacts of regularly-occurring short outages or from enabling facilities to power through potentially-catastrophic multi-day blackouts. 

Our ability to deliver this level of performance depends on more than just cutting-edge technology and Scale’s deep expertise in advanced microgrid design and engineering. It also requires having strong partnerships with our customers, which is at the heart of our approach to resilience more broadly. 

By working closely with our customers to understand the reliability risks they face, their facility’s energy and operational requirements, and their goals for their system, we can deliver affordable, best-fit reliability solutions with backup power that responds as quickly – and lasts as long – as you need. 

Reach out to Scale today at info@scalemicrogrids.com to learn how a microgrid can turn energy challenges – reliability included – into a competitive advantage. Or visit our website at www.scalemicrogrids.com.