Many failures of UPS systems come from the reliance on VRLA technology, which musted be rigorously maintained. Some jurisdictions do not allow the flooded-cell battery strings in certain building types, or the data centers just don’t want to spend the money on a flooded cell system. The expense of flooded cell sytems is trivial compared to an outage however.

The fact of the matter is, 365 Main’s “state of the art, greener solution” failed catastrophically. They sold their clients on the notion that flywheels are good for the earth (we will set aside the fact their generators run on diesel fuel for the moment) and that they are good for business. Well, clearly they are not that good for business. The client base needs to know the traditional lead-acid systems do not automatically poison the earth if properly handled, maintained and recycled, and can offer far more peace of mind.

By the way, some have mentioned high cost of downtime. This is not just a discussion of revenue losses. The mission critical nature of data streams/traffic extends into the realm of the preservation of human life. Commerce is certainly the mainstay of a building like that, but there could be ramifications to national defense, governmental communcation (think FAA) medical data…who knows.

The bottom line for me though, is even if the UPS has a problem, there is a high liklihood that it will seamlessly go to internal bypass, allowing site engineers the time to approach the UPS and perform troubleshooting…buying precious time. Again, the flywheel system offers no reaction time before it dumps the load should the generators fail to stabilize. 365 Main surely employs redundancy (N+1 or N+2) minimums so that a generator/flywheel that stumbles can be automatically locked out by the paralleling gear. If enough gensets drop out, the remaining gensets may be inadequate to carry the load, creating a voltage sag.

Battery backup systems are notoriously unreliable. If you do some googling for UPS failures, you’ll see that many ISPs have lost power due to UPS problems.

There are lots of big datacenters in the US that use flywheel continuous power systems and are extremely reliable.

I’ve personally experienced several UPS failures in computer rooms and datacenters.

I don’t think the underlying technology is to blame.

I will post any updates I get on the “post mortem” on my blog.

The way the system is designed, the flywheels have plenty of run time to spare before the diesel engine kicks in to spin them back up.

For some reason, this didn’t happen this time.

It’s unclear if it was operator error or a system failure. I’m betting it was operator error, or a procedural error.

As part of a deal with power utility PG&E, 365 Main generates their own power through these systems when PG&E has high loads on the utility (e.g. days/times of peak power demands). So these systems work and they have run off diesel in the past, with clean switchovers from utility power to in-house diesel power.

FYI- The website of the manufacturer of the system is here:

http://hitec.pageprocessor.nl/p3.php?RubriekID=2016

The real question is why the backup diesel generators didn’t start up. Maybe someone used a biodiesel fuel that wasn’t compatible with them?

Frankly, this is a silly article on a silly topic. As Farah Saeed has said, the flywheels could only provide a minute or so of power anyway, so they could only play a minor role in this problem. But more importantly, what is the actual ecological footprint of “green” vs. “non-green” backup power supplies?!? A gadget which is used very rarely?

If people accept we really have a problem with our energy future (oil depletion, global warming, etc.) then we should work on (and REPORT on) REAL solutions, not b.s. fluff pieces about the success or failure of “feel-good” technology.