An integrated data center solution on medium voltage level

Outsourcing, co-location and cloud computing, energy and cost-efficiency, environmental and legislative issues: running a data center in a constantly changing world is a huge challenge. In terms of electrical needs, scalability and speed to installation are second only to the absolute need to maximize uptime - the availability of power at all times. Also the power consumption is rising in this segment rapidly, so the distribution voltage levels become higher. Power consumptions of 15MW and higher are no exceptions anymore. Hitec Power Protection, a leading manufacturer of rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems using flywheel energy storage is active in the data center business for over 20 years. One of their integrated solutions operates on medium voltage level and is the perfect green and efficient solution for high power data centers. Looking at high power data center applications on medium voltage level, the biggest challenge was to find a green (SF6 free) switchgear with a small footprint, a maintenance free mechanism with a high number of operations, high reliability and that is easy to scale. With Eaton´s new modular switchgear type Power Xpert FMX, Hitec found their switchgear. The switchgear is modular in design. Besides that it contains a very reliable Electromagnetic mechanism that can switch more than 30.000 operations which is very suitable for high power rotary UPS systems, but also for the (smart)grid connection, where intelligent switching algorithms might be requested. This paper describes the challenges in designing a complete integrated high power data center application, with in- and output on medium voltage level, a solution Hitec and Eaton developed together.