Holistic Electrical Facility Protection Design

The largest lifecycle cost of a facility is and always has been maintenance. In many cases, facility managers fail to realize that the lifecycle of a building’s electrical components is directly related to the efficiency of its: power reliability, power quality, power protection, surge protection, electrical interference (EFI/RFI) protection, bonding, grounding and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). These facilities are dependent on certain inherent operating requirements, some examples are: electrical panels, roof, heating, air conditioning, elevators, floors, walls, ceilings, lighting, paint, fire protection, etc. Depending on the tenant, different types of electrical, electronic and digital equipment will be populated throughout the facility.

It is highly unlikely that the facility was built with a Holistic Electrical Facility Protection Design. When Holistic Facility Electrical Protection is not designed into the facility all electrical components are at risk of being affected by power disturbances such as: lightning strikes, utility power outage, radio frequency interference (RFI) electromagnetic interference (EMI), electromagnet compatibility (EMC) issues, and power surges. When electrical outages, electrical failure, and systems failures occur the costs can add up quickly. These costs could be anywhere from tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars just to repair or replace the equipment that was damaged or destroyed. Other costs are incurred as well when downtime happens, costs such as the loss of production, as well employees remaining idle while the electrical system is down.

On June 29, 2001 Primen, issued to EPRI the EPRI’s Consortium for Electric Infrastructure for a Digital Society (CEIDS) report. The report’s main focus was on the financial losses from power disturbance on three broad sectors of the United States economy, The Digital Economy (DE), Continuous Process Manufacturing (CPM) and Fabrication and essential Services (F&ES). Their findings were that across all business sectors, the United States economy is losing between $104 billion and $164 billion a year to outages and another $15 billion to $24 billion to Power Quality (PQ) phenomena. The report found that the electrical utilities cause twenty (20%) of the losses and that the facility itself causes eighty (80%) of the losses. Today these same losses would amount to at least a thirty-five (35%) increase due to inflation.

Few United States businesses even know that this report exists. Not knowing that Holistic Electrical Facility Protection is available most companies in the United States keep accepting these outages and failures as a normal cost of doing business.

Holistic Facility Electrical Protection will eliminate most of these losses except from actual total power failure from the power supplier to the facility; however, the utility providers across the United States, over a ten-year period average, delivers power to facilities 99.5% of the time.

If we use the reports calculation of twenty (20%) of the losses are the public utilities and eighty (80%) is the facility’s losses, we could argue that during a ten-year period the electrical outages from the public utilities is 0.5% per year and that electrical outages from within the facilities would amount to 2.0% each year also. This would mean that each year your business is going to average 2.5% of time to electrical outages. Depending on when this average of 2.5% of electrical outages occurs, all of these businesses could save money by implementing Holistic Electrical Facility Protection for their facilities.

Holistic Electrical Facility Protection takes into account protection and performance for each and every electrical device and electrical system in the building as well as the complete footprint of the compound. Below are just a few of our Holistic Electrical Facility Protection design components:

• Ac Service Panels
• Ac to Dc Converters
• Ac to Dc Inverters
• Antennas including GPS
• Back Up Power Invertors
• Back Up Power Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS’s)
• Building/Earth Ground Ring
• Cable Shields Coaxial (Antenna, GPS, CCTV, CATV)
• Cable Shields Data
• Cable Shields Ethernet (Cat 5 - Cat7)
• Cable Shields Fiber (Metallic Shield)
• Cable Shields Telco
• Cable Shields Telco OSP
• Dc Batteries
• Dc to Ac Inverters
• Dc to Dc Converters
• Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) Protection
• Generator
• Ground Potential Rise GPR mitigation design
• Grounding electrode system and
• Handholds and ground bars inside handholds
• Lightning protection system (LPS)
• Miscellaneous components
• Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) Protection
• SPD Ac (Types: 1,2,3,4 and 5)
• SPD Dc CATV
• SPD DC CCTV
• SPD Dc Coaxial
• SPD Dc Data
• SPD Dc Telco
• Tower Ground Ring
• Tower Ground Mat

Through proper implementation of the above components the overall maintenance costs for servicing your facility’s electrical system could be drastically reduced while increasing the overall lifecycle of the facility’s electrical equipment. Call us today to schedule your Holistic Facility Electrical Protection Evaluation to find out where your facility stands.