Des Moines Register
03-10-07
Elbert: Businesses get backup power, avoid a flatline
lmost all workplaces depend on computers; when the electricity is out, they need
help to function.
By DAVID ELBERT
REGISTER BUSINESS EDITOR
This year's blizzards and ice storms could be to many Iowa homeowners what
Hurricane Katrina and the East Coast power blackout of 2003 were to
businesses: A wake-up call about how dependent we are on uninterrupted
electrical power.
"In the past, we put backup generators in buildings mainly for life safety, to back
up fire alarms and elevators and things like that," said Steve Westberg of Baker
Electric.
Today, many employees can't work when their computers crash, so the push is
on to protect desktop computers and communications systems that are the
lifeline of modern business.
"Half an hour of downtime can cost some businesses hundreds of thousands of
dollars," Westberg said.
Tens of thousands of banking transactions per hour flow through the computing
equipment of Shazam, the Johnston-based debit card business that created the
nation's first statewide network of automated teller machines.
The network serves more than 1,600 financial institutions in 30 states, and all it
takes is a power failure of a few minutes to cause a lot of problems, said
Shazam's Terry Dooley.
"We take a very global view to our power," Dooley said.
The company has created redundancies on top of redundancies to protect that
power supply, he said.
Shazam is one of dozens of central Iowa businesses that have backed up their
power supplies with on-site generators and batteries in recent years.
Sales of backup generators and battery-powered uninterruptible power supplies,
or UPS, have grown an average of 11 percent per year nationally since 2000,
according to EC&M, a trade publication for electrical contractors.
"We're seeing close to 20 to 30 percent growth" in sales of backup-generation
products, said Russ Stokes, manager of the generator division of Electrical
Equipment Engineering, or 3E, in West Des Moines.
New office buildings, such as the Nationwide/Allied headquarters in downtown
Des Moines and the Wells Fargo financial and mortgage centers, come equipped
with elaborate backup power systems, Westberg said.
But there's also a substantial business in retrofitting commercial buildings.
Industries that process a lot of information, such as insurance companies and
banks, run huge risks today if they operate without backup power.
Other businesses also see the need. The corporate headquarters for Hy-Vee
Food Stores and Color FX have added backup power in recent years, as has the
Polk County office building, Westberg said.
The cost of protecting a power supply with backup generators and UPS batteries
can range from $50,000 to more than $1 million, Westberg said.
Shazam spent more than a million dollars over the last three or four years to
create a system that can run its network operations without outside power for as
long as seven days without generators needing to be refueled, Dooley said.
Not only do businesses need more power than they did a decade ago, but the
configuration of power within buildings has also changed dramatically, said Doug
Jacobson, a computer science expert at Iowa State University.
"It used to be that you just had to keep your mainframe computer room running,"
Jacobson said. "All you needed was a giant battery pack or a single point
generator right into that mainframe room."
Now, "computing is completely distributed," with desktop computers at every
workstation, he said. Instead of relying on a mainframe computer, much of
business is now done over the Internet and through in-house computing
networks.
"Now, you have to bring the whole building back alive, or good portions of the
building" after a power failure, Jacobson said. "That requires a whole different
type of power-generation system, because you are distributing the power
throughout the building."
Power needs will continue to increase, Jacobson said.
New forms of communication, such as Voice over Internet Protocol, require
power, he said. "It's not like your good old-fashioned telephone that received its
power from the central office downtown," Jacobson said.
"More and more of our life we can't operate without being powered up."
You can't blame the power company, the experts agreed, because power, at
least in central Iowa, is much more reliable than it used to be.
MidAmerican Energy, the power utility for the Des Moines area, has spent an
average of $105 million a year to upgrade its distribution system since 2000 and
will spend another $120 million this year, said spokesman Allan Urlis.
MidAmerican's improvements - which include burying cable underground to
protect it from ice, snow and wind storms - have dramatically reduced the
average length of power outages from about eight hours to less than a couple of
hours, said Baker Electric's Westberg.
The problem for business, said ISU's Jacobson, is that while power is more
reliable, computers and other business machines are much more sensitive to
power fluctuations than equipment from bygone eras.
Businesses deal with that sensitivity by installing UPS batteries that are designed
to provide a consistent flow of power.
Many businesses are adding backup generators to their UPS systems because
power failures are becoming so costly to business production.
Power outages cost the nation close to $80 billion a year, according to EC&M.
With that kind of expense, the trade publication added, it's not surprising that
businesses were expected to spend more than $7 billion last year on products
designed to improve the quality and consistency of electricity.
Many Iowa businesses began reassessing their power needs after the East
Coast blackout of 2003 focused attention on the instability of the national power
grid, 3E's Stokes said.
The hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 reinforced those concerns, as businesses
began calculating how much it would cost if they had to shut down for a day or
two or more because of power problems.
"A lot of companies now are demanding 24-7 service. They can't afford to be
down," Stokes said.
This winter's ice storms won't have a lot of impact on sales of commercial
generators, he said, because most big businesses are already aware of the
problem.
But, he added, "the residential market is driven by disaster. We'll sell a lot of
residential systems because of this storm."
The good news for homeowners, he said, is that their price for power-backup
systems is much less than the price for commercial equipment: $500 to $6,000 in
most cases, he said.
Keeping the power flowing at home
Iowans who lost power during this winter's storms can purchase gasolinepowered backup generators for as little as $500, although a good quality portable
generator will cost $1,000 or more, said 3E's Russ Stokes.
Home computers should not be powered by a small-scale portable generator
because power is not consistent enough, said Iowa State University computer
expert Doug Jacobson. Stokes said anyone interested in running a home
computer off a generator should expect to spend about $5,000 on a generator
and purchase a small-scale uninterruptible power supply for about $250 to make
sure the power level remains consistent.
Other appliances, such as refrigerators and entertainment centers, can be
powered off smaller generators, but homeowners should be careful and read
instructions to learn which appliances can be run off which generators, Stokes
said.
Business Editor David Elbert can be reached at (515) 284-8533 or
delbert@dmreg.com