ISE Magazine, March 2019
I S E I C T S O L U T I O N S E D U C AT I O N 2 2 HYBRID BACKUP POWER The Power of Green Technologies for Disaster Recovery By Darin Painter gensure@ plugpower com @ plugpowerinc A recent report from the United Nations office for disaster risk reduction stated that worldwide costs of climate related natural disasters earthquakes floods hurricanes and the like have surged to total nearly 29 trillion over the last 20 years1 Restoring downed grid power and communications networks in devastated areas is no easy task With data showing an increase in the rate of these disasters perhaps the best way forward is to continue to focus our efforts on improving disaster recovery and backup power Innovative clean energy solutions can provide continuous backup power for the days if not weeks it takes to restore this critical infrastructure enabling recovery teams to complete their work under the toughest conditions without adding environmental impact Data collected since 1980 by leading global reinsurance company Munich RE illustrates the trend seen over the last 2 decades2 Worldwide there has been a steady growth in the number of service impacting events See Figure 1 Even more startling is a comparison of North American events over three 5 year time periods from 1980 until 2017 From 1980 to 1985 there were 361 service interrupting events Compare this to a total of 535 events during the 2000 through 2005 period and 850 events from 2012 through 2017 and the trend becomes obvious Though they are spread across North America our continent is seeing significant increases in service interrupting events Whether one wishes to attribute that trend to climate change or not the fact is that our teams are
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