Facility managers responsible for critical facility operations are constantly concerned with electrical power reliability. Preventing unplanned downtime is paramount. And with 24/7 availability increasingly a requirement, reducing and eliminating planned downtime is almost as important.
Most critical electrical systems operate reliably even with many details not right. Ironically, the more redundancy built into a system, the more likely that latent defects can lurk unnoticed. The equipment and systems are often robust enough to soldier on with maladies that may or may not be apparent. Even with everything right and functioning correctly, sooner or later something will break. But when enough things are wrong, and find themselves lined up to compound each other, the result is what’s often described as a “comedy of errors” that brings the system down. Sometimes it’s difficult to determine exactly which straw broke the camel’s back.
