The need for extended battery backup time during the transition to on-site generators in data centers has undergone a fundamental transformation. Since the ability to swiftly transition to generators during a power disruption is now defined in seconds rather than minutes, the energy storage paradigm that required large-scale battery installations supporting several minutes of backup time has become a costly relic of a bygone era.
With the advent of new critical power architectures for redundancy and reliability, the need for energy storage in UPSs has changed. Thirty years ago, UPSs were used as backup power to provide time for an orderly “systematic shutdown” of computing systems whenever there was a utility power disturbance. The time required for the UPS to continue to provide power (after an outage) was based on how long it took to stop all processes without negatively impacting data integrity or losing any data. Even with on-site generators, the old paralleling schemes and technology generators took minutes to gain enough speed and voltage to synchronize before carrying the load, requiring minutes of bridging time from the UPS.