Active Power
Successful outcome during controlled maintenance of Tesla production line
Modern electric vehicle manufacturing is heavily automated meaning the downtime costs of any sudden and complete loss of power to a production line can be catastrophic.
Power outages resulting in tens of millions of dollars in losses were not uncommon in modern car manufacturing. But with the right UPS and energy storage technology they can be made a thing of the past.
The effects of power quality issues or sudden power loss down-time span scrappage, and time and effort required to reset the production line which impacts welding robots, robots performing casting of car parts such as the chassis, and body part press and stamping machines.
Such factories require solutions that allow for controlled shut-down of hundreds of manufacturing robots which in turn enables fast restart when baseload power returns.
In one recent project this proved vital for Tesla, the world’s leading electric vehicle maker, Active Power was able to hit every milestone during the entire process from Sales, Manufacturing, Shipping, Installation Assistance, Startup and Commissioning.
Active Power’s solution was to provide the car maker with a Kinetic energy store backed UPS comprising 2 x 2.4MW CleanSource PLUS MMS UPS’s, each protecting a 3000A production line.
With a total flywheel runtime of 20 seconds at full load, this solution would provide enough ride through time for 99.9% of all unplanned outages that have been recorded at the site. Due to this high probability, the customer ultimately decided that an ATS and Diesel Genset for long term outages were not needed.
UPS protected power is supplied to the manufacturing robots to allow for full production to resume in a few hours instead of 26-28 hours of downtime that was needed to reset and recalibrate the robots if control power is lost.
One additional CleanSource PLUS SMS 333kW UPS was purchased to replace a 15+ year old battery UPS that failed during the time the 2x 2.4MW manufacturing UPS modules were in production.
Active Power was able to provide this additional UPS in the short time frame required by the customer.
This SMS replaced the original 12ft wide UPS that also had a separate battery room.
Active Power’s proven technology is based on a highly fault tolerant IGBT architecture designed to protect all critical loads, such as data centers, industrial processes and healthcare applications.
About Active Power
Active Power designs and manufactures battery-free flywheel uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and energy storage products for mission-critical power applications worldwide from its headquarters and manufacturing plant in Austin TX. The company was founded in 1996 and became public in 2001(NASDAQ).
In November 2016 the business was acquired by German group, Piller Power Systems. Today, US customers are served via Austin and internationally via Piller’s global network of subsidiaries and service centers. Piller is a division of the UK engineering and industrial group, Langley Holdings plc.
