A small PQ event can create substantial costs

A service interruption immediately generates substantial costs, particularly when service level agreements are involved. A power interruption not only has financial consequences in terms of equipment, maintenance, and personnel required to fix the problem. It also has an impact in terms of revenues, contractual agreements and customer satisfaction. The consequences of power interruptions or variations include:

• Costly customer claims. With IT and Telecom companies expected to deliver a flawless service, any power interruption often results in costly claims and customer service credits.
• Impact on business reputation. A power continuity failure is liable to affect a company’s business reputation and therefore result in losing clients. Once a company’s reputation is dented, it takes far more time to restore it than it has to weaken it.
• Immediate multi-site impact due to the very nature of IT networks. The central data centre of an IT company feeds data to many computers around the world. When it stops running, data becomes unavailable to multiple locations; furthermore, revenue is lost as employees are at a standstill.
• Expert technicians need to be called in to address the cause of the problem. These additional, unscheduled and often out of contract man-hours are very costly.
• Cost of servicing clients. The cost of a single service call may seem insignificant. However, in the case of a telephone company with broad geographical coverage, the cost of these calls (particularly exchanges in remote areas) mounts up surprisingly quickly.
• Electrical systems may need to be completely or partially redesigned. The cost of redesigning an electrical system is higher than designing a system from scratch. However, both are cheaper than the problems they are designed to avoid or resolve.
• Repairing subsequent damage to servers, switchboards, hubs, etc. is an expensive business. Replacing IT or telecom equipment can be a considerable hit for a company’s budget, especially if it is unforecasted.

Resilient and robust design is key to keeping a data centre or telecom network up and running.