A university is a small town. Laboratories, data centres, animal facilities, cleanrooms, libraries, sports halls, lecture theatres and thousands of students living on site, many of the buildings running 24 hours a day. When the mains fails the losses are not just inconvenience. A research freezer holding samples collected over twenty years can be lost in a few hours. An animal unit without ventilation is an emergency within minutes. PCAS has carried out generator and switchgear work for universities in Yorkshire and this article sets out what we have learned about getting campus standby power right.

Decide what actually needs backing up

Not everything on a campus needs a generator, and trying to back up everything produces a system nobody can afford to test. The first job is a load schedule that puts every supply in a category.

• Life safety. Emergency lighting, fire alarm and detection, firefighting lifts, smoke extract and fume cupboard extract. Covered by building regulations and British Standards and non negotiable.
• Research critical. Minus 80 freezers, liquid nitrogen plant, incubators, animal units, controlled environment rooms, cleanroom pressure. Hours of loss can destroy years of work.
• Business critical. Server rooms, network cores, telephony, security and access control, teaching systems during exams.
• Comfort. General heating, lighting and power that can wait.

Research critical and business critical loads usually need a UPS to bridge the gap before the generator takes over, particularly freezer controllers and IT. The generator then carries the UPS and the rest of the essential load for as long as the outage lasts.

One big scheme or building by building

Older campuses have grown a generator at a time, one per building, each with its own fuel tank, changeover panel and service visit. That works but it is expensive to maintain and every set is a single point of failure for its building. The alternatives are a central generating station feeding the campus HV network, or a smaller number of larger synchronised sets with switchgear that can route power to where it is needed. Multi set schemes with ComAp controls share the load across the plant and let you take any one set out for maintenance without losing cover. See our complex power control schemes page for how these work.

Whichever route you take, fit generator connection points on the main boards so a hire set can be plugged in during a long outage or while a set is away for overhaul.

Testing around term time

A generator that is never tested on load will let you down. A monthly on load test in the middle of a lecture or an exam will get you shouted at. The answer is a test programme agreed with the timetable: on load tests early morning or during reading weeks, and the annual full load test using a load bank during the vacation so it does not depend on building load at all. Record every test. Insurers, auditors and research funders increasingly ask for the evidence.

Noise, emissions and neighbours

City centre campuses sit next to housing. Sound attenuated canopies, acoustic enclosures and exhaust silencers need to be specified for the night time noise limit, not the daytime one, because that is when the outage will happen. Larger sets may need an environmental permit under the medium combustion plant rules even when they only run for testing. Fuel storage near student accommodation needs bunding, fill point protection and clear procedures for deliveries. Our guide to generator sound attenuation covers the options.

Solar, batteries and the generator working together

Most campuses now have solar PV and some have CHP and battery storage. These have to be coordinated with the standby generators. Solar inverters must disconnect when the mains fails unless they are deliberately controlled to run in island mode with the generators. A battery system can cover the short break before the generators start and reduce the number of starts for brief dips. ComAp InteliNeo controllers manage generators, solar and batteries as one system and we have commissioned several of these schemes. See hybrid microgrids and solar PV and battery storage.

A service agreement that fits a campus

Students live on site, so faults happen at 2am on a Sunday as often as 10am on a Tuesday. Our 24/7 service agreements cover planned servicing, on load testing, load bank testing and emergency callout across every set on the campus, with one point of contact for the estates team and one report format.

Call 0114 317 7939 or email support@pcasltd.com to arrange a survey of your campus standby power.

Have a question about this article? Email support@pcasltd.com or call 0114 317 7939.