
Educational facilities have been facing incredible adversity: whether it’s weather events, grid failures, or potential threats from outside parties. Power outages can cripple schools with impacts on class schedules, as well as the potential for data loss and critical equipment damage. For universities, this could mean losing thousands of dollars and countless hours of student and faculty time should heating/cooling units preserving grant-based experiments become inoperable.
Even elementary and secondary schools have fire alarms, phone systems, and computer networks that may need protection from a backup generator in case of a power outage. In addition, many educational buildings are used as fall-out shelters, so backup power is needed for emergency lighting to ensure safe passage for everyone in the building.
Power Up with MPS
With so much at stake, many educational facilities are relying on high kW generators to provide the standby/emergency power needed. These generators can ensure the heating, cooling, ventilation, refrigeration, security, and elevator systems can continue to work. These capabilities allow a school to continue functioning until normal power is restored.
Generac’s inventive Modular Power System (MPS) for paralleling generators offers educational facilities with the power, redundancy, scalability, and safety required.
The MPS approach does not require dedicated third-party switchgear. Future expansion generators simply tie directly to the generator bus. Because the paralleling is already built into the generator, the Generac MPS system inherently has greater flexibility for growth, requires less electrical room space, and reduces initial capital cost.
With Generac’s MPS system, the generators do not have to be next to each other to be paralleled. Many universities are using separate gensets located inside/outside different campus buildings to ensure safety from potential threats and maintain smooth operation.
In addition, our MPS allows you to combine fuel options: diesel, natural gas or even bi-fuel. This not only gives you have the benefits of genset redundancy, you also have fuel redundancy. And natural gas relies on a strong underground pipeline network that is rarely impacted by weather. Win-win.