Glasgow Commonwealth Games

Showcasing over 250 different sporting events and welcoming over 4,950 athletes the Glasgow games was hailed as the most successful Commonwealth Games to date.

With much of the overall infrastructure relying on a continuous power supply including critical electrical equipment such as lighting, CCTV, security systems, I.T and broadcasting equipment, it was vital that these were supported by resilient power protection solutions.

The solution and results

If there had been a disruption in power, thousands of people would have been affected at the games, but also the millions of people watching the games on television- causing not only financial implications but also logistics ones too.

A total of 458 individual UPS units ranging between 1kVA through to 80kVA, where delivered to over 19 sites in Glasgow. Delivery to the various locations required precision planning and timing, which was expertly handled by all parties involved.

The majority of the order comprised a selection of Borri rack mountable, rotation UPS systems (now housed under the CertaUPS brand). The battery backup runtimes required for the different units ranged from 5 minutes to six hours, depending on the standby generators supplied by others. The B300R (CRT300R) and B400R (CRT400R) series are high efficiency, flexible single phase solutions.

A wide selection of tower online double conversion solutions were also selected. These included B400 (CRT400) 3kVA units, B500 (CRT500) 10kVA systems with 2 hour battery runtime, five B500 EVO (CRT500) 20kVA with 6hour runtimes and a Borri B8000FXS 80kVA.

Adding to the complexity of the project, the Borri B8000FXS 80kVA was placed within a custom built container to provide an easier delivery and connection to the generator.

All UPS systems and generators delivered resilient backup and were all delivered within a short time frame, which met the games needs. The event was left unaffected, with a nation of happy spectators and sporting competitors.

In addition to the UPS units supplied, Borri also provided 55 SNMP cards so the Commonwealth Games Committee was able to remotely monitor and manage these units using an Ethernet connection over a Local Area Network, although there were no faults reported during the games period on any of the units supplied, the remote connection gave valuable peace of mind to the games organisers.