Power Outage and How It can be A Danger to Any Industry

Without an uninterruptible power supply or UPS to back a computer, we can imagine the inconvenience that a power outage can cause to both the hardware and the person using it. Power outages can easily put someone into a really bad mood especially if the person is interrupted from their activity. That certain person might be in a middle of really good movie, or is working on a term paper that is due tomorrow. Power surges can even corrupt computer system files when the outage occurs when the hard disk is overwriting data. Depending on which data is corrupted, it could lead to not allowing your computer to reboot.

According to the Department of Energy in their 2014 Power Situationer, the Philippines generates enough electricity to power up most of the Philippines in which electricity is available. Majority of the electricity is distributed to residential areas, industrial sector, and commercial sector. But no matter how much energy is produced it cannot prevent power outages.

Power outages can be caused by extreme weather conditions. In the Philippines, power outages often occur during typhoons. In other countries where there are more diverse seasons, extreme cold and snow can also cause power outage. On a smaller scale, a simple fallen tree, or power line obstruction can cause an outages. Flooding, vehicular, and road accidents can also be cause power outages.

Looking at the bigger picture, if an individual person can experience inconvenience from a simple power outage, how much more for big businesses? To put it simply, power outages is a production disruption. A business that is not prepared for power outages is literally losing money when it occurs. The following are just some of the industries that may suffer during outages and how they are directly affected:

1. Manufacturing Industries –
The most affected industry when power outages occur is the manufacturing industry as most machinery needed for production depend on electricity. The power outage can easily be translated into loss of valuable productive time. Small scale manufacturer that cannot afford backup power supply may lose more when power outages last for more than few hours.

2. Entertainment Venues –
Power outage can really be costly for entertainment venues. It can lead to cancelation of shows or/and performance that may lead to rescheduling, refund of tickets, cancellation, and additional man-power.

3. Consulting and Information Technology (IT) Services
In an age where IT operations are an organization’s window to the rest of the world, power outages result in crashed computer systems, lost data and abrupt termination of communications with clients.

This is often followed by several weeks of effort spent in recreating hundreds of man-hours of work. Programs and data may get corrupted resulting in software recovery operations that may not be resolved for weeks.

For industries that relies on computers a simple uninterruptible power supply can do the fix and protect you from the surges that comes with outages. But power outages can be a hazard to any business if precautionary measures are not set up properly.