APU's popping up at East Mids Hospitals - sign of power outs?

[Dave Liquorice]

27 May 2008

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Thought it was a long time ago.

It seems incredible to me they haven't build replacement power stations to replace those either simply worn out or shut because of pollution. It can hardly have come as a surprise.

[harry]

All hospitals have emergency generators and have done for decades. They're probably having some work done on internal electricity distribution cables. Funny time of year. Maybe some unexpected fault has arisen.

[harry]

The only way that can be done is by continuous synchronised running. Normally it takes around ten seconds to restore electricity with the emergency generator if there is a power failure.

[ARW]

Maybe they are going to be used for sync running to allow a section of the hospital electrics to be closed off from the grid and existing genny to allow some work to be done!

[Paul]

Sounds like DRUPS:

Motor-generator turns flywheel. If mains fails, flywheel drives generator until engine up to speed. Now used in data-centres like ours as more efficient than battery UPS.

Paul.

[Johnny B Good]

ISTR a run up time from cold to generating of 24 hours. Your 3 to 4 days figure seems overly pessimistic unless you're referring to the time it takes to get a mothballed station back up and running.

[Dave Liquorice]

generating

That date was when Sizewell B and Longannet tripped within a couple of hours of each other. Used all the margin, struggled to ramp up the output of other stations whilst also loseing some more stations during the afternoon. It's worth finding a detailed report of that day...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

So it was caused by faults rather than a lack of basic capacity?

As I understand it today, we might have problems with demand exceeding supply even without additional faults?

[Vir Campestris]

Just make sure the fuel pump is on the driven side, not the grid side.

Yes, it's been done...

Andy