Eaton

Africa will be reliant on back up generators for the foreseeable future, according to the African branch of global power company Eaton.

The need for back up power will continue as long as there are power shortages and blackouts on the continent, Shane Kilfoil, Managing Director of Eaton Africa, told ESPL.

He spoke as Eaton expanded its distribution network in a new partnership with South African Diesel Electric Services.

The partnership with DES will cover South Africa, and several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Botswana and the Ivory Coast, said Shane Kilfoil, Managing Director of Eaton Africa.

Eaton, which has had a presence in the African market since 1927, is looking to partner with full service providers. It currently has more than 80 distributors across the continent.

Kilfoil said it would be a long time until we get to the stage where Africa can be completely unreliant of backup generators.

He added: “There is a severe power shortage in Africa, and blackouts are common. So most African countries are very familiar with diesel generators and generators in general.”

Global power management company Eaton has increased its South East Asia operations by opening a new manufacturing facility for its electrical products in the Philippines.

The new 29,000-square-meter production facility in Tanauan City, Batangas will make electrical products, including UPS systems for the global market.

The factory is expected to generate a significant number of new jobs locally, with up to 2,000 employees projected for 2017.

Power management company Eaton has added an advanced uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system line to its UPS portfolio in India.

The UPS is designed for protection and support of critical industrial operations in heavy engineering and manufacturing. The UPS ranges from 15kVA to 80kVA.

According to Eaton, the system delivers an efficiency
of up to 98.5%. The 93E provides surge suppression for load, detects location of faults and is able to switch to double-conversion operation in less than 4ms.

Eaton’s UPS uses sensing circuitry and three-stage charging technique aiming to extend the service life of the UPS battery while optimising battery recharge time.

"Eaton's extended range of 93E UPS is an ideal solution for facilitating a lower total cost of ownership through a combination of energy efficiency and high reliability in extensive manufacturing and other mission-critical operations," said Syed Sajjadh Ali, managing director Eaton India.

The introduced range enhances compatibility by providing a 0.99 input power factor and less than 5% total harmonic distortion, thus eliminating interference with other critical equipment in the same network, the company said.

According to a recent research report, the Indian UPS market is expected to increase at a rate of around 11% from 2014 to 2018 due to the growth of industrial and commercial infrastructure in India.

Power management company Eaton has opened an office in Nigeria’s capital Lagos.

“The development and use of innovative technologies is critical in increasing energy efficiency in Africa,” said Shane Kilfoil, managing director of Eaton’s Electrical Sector in Africa.

The company explained that the increasing demand of electricity due to Nigeria’s business growth has led to the decision to expand in Africa. “Africa’s energy challenges lie not in building more and larger power generation plants, but instead in investment in advanced power management technologies to enable businesses to do more with less energy in an increasingly resource constrained world,” Kilfoil added.

Nigeria’s federal government is currently restructuring the country’s electricity market. “The reform will enable Nigeria to overcome its huge deficit in the supply of electricity,” said Charles Iyo regional sales manager West Africa at Eaton.

The office in Lagos will also provide services to Western Africa. Eaton has several offices in Africa and 300,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space on the continent for the production of its critical power supplies.

Eaton has integrated its power management system with EMC’s VSPEX infrastructure platform. The integration aims to simplify the deployment of private cloud and end-user computing solutions.

Eaton’s 9PX uninterruptible power system (UPS), managed ePDU rack-based power distribution units and intelligent power manager software were one of the first components to receive lab verification from EMC for VSPEX interoperability.

Eaton delivers power management, monitoring and protection options to the platform. VSPEX customers utilise Eaton’s software to automate disaster recovery and business continuity processes directly from the server management platform including the consolidation of non-critical workloads to transparent live migration of virtual machines and movement in the event of an extended power event.

“Our collaboration with EMC highlights the capabilities of Eaton's integrated power management solutions, building on the scalable benefits of VSPEX to help customers obtain command and control over IT assets through power management in order to drive business value,' said Herve Tardy, vice President and general manager of distributed power quality division at Eaton.

Part of the collaboration is working with technology distributor and supply-chain services provider Ingram Micro to facilitate technology design and integration of the VSPEX solution with lab-tested Eaton components.

“Eaton and EMC understand the importance of streamlining the integration process in order to support its channel partners with a consistent, reliable solution for end-users to accelerate virtualisation and converged infrastructure deployment”, said Ronald Villa, director of storage business unit at Ingram Micro.