Environment friendly high quality, high availability telecom power plant architecture

Most telecom facilities are traditionally powered by 24, 48 or 60 VDC power plant that typically has several hours (2 to 8 hours) of battery reserve power, inverters or UPS to supply AC power, and a diesel generator to provide continuity of service during long utility outage. The objective of this paper is to present and discuss an alternative, environment friendly, and cost effective telecom power plant architecture using a centralized UPS & microturbine system. In this system, the reserve power is provided by a micro-turbine which is directly connected to the DC bus of a UPS; battery reserve power is only used as a bridge with the grid. The systems will then provide critical AC power equipment (including air conditioning) or the battery-less point of use rectifiers necessary to power the -48VDC telecom switches. This architecture takes into account the high availability requirements (unavailability less than 3 × 10-7) of telecom operators while providing significant advantages: reduced battery storage, clean emission, higher reliability, reduced operating cost, rapid return on investment. Furthermore, the UPS coupled with a micro-turbine with natural gas feed will not only provide constant clean power, but also virtually unlimited backup time in case of electricity outage. This paper presents the architecture and the economic results based on three case studies: small, medium and large telecom facilities.