The growth of the internet and an increase of e-commerce have spawned a new explosion of 'mission-critical' facility construction. High reliability web hosts (internet service providers) often require annual reliability levels of 99.9999 per cent or higher. This equates to an average annual service interruption time of just 32 seconds (Figure I). Hourly downtime losses for these 24/7 facilities can exceed millions of dollars per hour. EPRI in the USA indicates that losses from outages at high tech firms in California's Silicon Valley can be up to DOLLAR I million per minute I. After the facility is operating, implementation of a strong preventative maintenance program is necessary to realise the reliability expectations of the original design. Through application of new predictive maintenance supporting technology (Partial Discharge Testers) reliability can be enhanced even further. Any facility manager utilising medium voltage equipment and wishes to reduce downtime should perform regular partial discharge surveys to reduce component failures and increase reliability.
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