Battery-free UPS challenges traditional power supply concepts

    When it comes to UPS power supply, people will naturally think of huge battery packs. Today, the flywheel UPS products from ActivePower in the United States have completely overturned this traditional concept, replacing lead-acid batteries with exquisite flywheels, bringing UPS power supply into a new realm.

    People are wondering: is a UPS still a UPS without a battery? Can its energy efficiency, reliability, etc. still be guaranteed? To this, Wang Huan, President of ActivePower Greater China, answered that the world's first computer, ENIAC, covered an area of ​​170 square meters, weighed 30 tons, and could perform 5,000 additions and 500 multiplications in one second. What about today's computers?

    With the advancement of technology and the change of user needs, product upgrading is inevitable. Today, flywheel UPS has been widely used in large domestic data centers. The world's largest search engine and the cloud computing center of the largest software company, as well as internationally renowned companies such as VISA and 3M, have begun to use flywheel UPS products in their newly built data centers. Traditional UPS is facing challenges from flywheel UPS.

    Inherent advantages are eye-catching

    In fact, flywheel energy storage is not a new concept. The earliest UPS used mechanical energy storage, which was an electric motor with a large flywheel - a generator set. The generator had a flywheel weighing several tons, which could maintain normal power supply for several seconds after a power outage. However, due to the large size of the flywheel, the noise and stability did not meet the requirements, and it was not suitable for large-scale application.

    It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that NASA Research Center began to use flywheels as energy storage batteries on satellites. After the 1990s, the emergence of high-strength carbon fiber composite materials greatly increased the kinetic energy storage per unit mass; the research progress of magnetic levitation technology and high-temperature superconducting technology was rapid, and the friction loss and wind loss of flywheel rotors were reduced to a minimum by using magnetic levitation and vacuum technology; and the new progress of electronic power technology brought huge development space for flywheel energy storage technology.

    Due to its own mechanical energy storage method, the flywheel UPS has not only greatly improved the power supply efficiency, but also far surpassed the reliability of the chemical energy storage method of traditional power supplies. According to industry statistics, 70% of the failures of traditional UPS are caused by batteries, and batteries have become one of the most unreliable components of traditional UPS systems. However, the energy storage and discharge processes of the flywheel UPS can be accurately monitored and calculated during high-speed rotation, and the reliability is almost perfect. The zero-millisecond switching that has troubled the industry in the past can also be easily achieved.

    Energy saving is very useful

    According to a survey, more than 70% of the world's top 1,000 companies will update and expand their data center equipment in the next five years. The rapid growth of applications and computing density has led to rising capital pressure. The power consumption of data centers has increased fivefold in the past 10 years. The cost of using a 1U server is as high as twice the purchase cost, and it continues to increase. The soaring energy prices have also led to a more difficult situation. The cost of energy consumption has become 30% to 50% of the operating costs consumed by the IT industry. Among them, the power consumption of peripheral equipment such as UPS and air conditioners is much higher than that of the host. This continuously increasing operating cost will become a permanent "pain" in the hearts of data center users if it cannot be transformed.

    Compared with traditional UPS power supplies, the advantages of flywheel UPS in energy saving are very obvious. First, its power supply efficiency is as high as 98%, which is 5%-6% higher than traditional power supplies. Data shows that, for example, if the power supply efficiency of a 10MW data center is improved by 1%, the annual electricity bill can be saved by more than 700,000 yuan; secondly, the flywheel UPS has strong environmental adaptability and can operate normally between 0 degrees Celsius and 40 degrees Celsius.

The air conditioner used to cool the battery is no longer needed, and the power consumption of IT-related equipment has been greatly reduced. According to calculations by an authoritative American organization, the power saved by using a flywheel UPS from ActivePower is enough to power 101 households for a year. Today, when energy consumption contradictions have become prominent, the energy-saving characteristics of flywheel UPS have attracted much attention, which is also the main reason for its large-scale application in Europe and the United States.

    Green environmental protection cannot be ignored

    Currently, data center carbon dioxide emissions account for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Information equipment emits about 35 million tons of waste gas into the atmosphere every year, which is equivalent to the carbon dioxide emissions of the entire aviation industry. Europe has introduced new carbon emission standards. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has also issued a new guideline on the risks related to climate change that listed companies must disclose to investors. In April this year, the United States, Japan and Europe reached a green data center agreement, which was strongly supported by the US Department of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the EU Code of Conduct and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

    In the 11th Five-Year Plan, my country actively advocated and promoted the use of renewable energy and developed a low-carbon economy based on low energy consumption, low pollution and low emissions, which has become an inevitable choice for achieving sustainable social and economic development in my country.

    Flywheel UPS completely abandons traditional batteries, is completely pollution-free, emission-free, and 100% recyclable, making it easy to build a green power system for data centers. Using an ActivePower power supply system can reduce 818 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Since 2000, ActivePower has eliminated the use of more than 1.9 million lead-acid batteries (containing about 27,000 tons of lead) and reduced more than 800,000 tons of CO2 emissions, which is in line with the world trend of low-carbonization of the world economy.

    Of course, the flywheel UPS has also been questioned, such as the short energy storage time and whether it can be safely switched with the oil generator under the existing conditions of domestic computer rooms. Even so, the challenges from the flywheel UPS cannot be underestimated.