PMP launch - a resounding success

PMP launch - a resounding success

By Jack Ward, MD of Powermode

The launch of the Powermode Management Portal (PMP) in both Johannesburg and Cape Town over the last couple of weeks was a resounding success. The launch events, in the form of breakfast seminars, were extremely well supported by interested attendees from a broad cross section of commercial, industrial and public sector organisations.

Our guests enthusiastically welcomed the PMP. They learned that it is a locally designed and manufactured GSM cellular-based system geared to monitor a company’s standby power environment, reporting on a range of critical parameters associated with uninterruptible power supply systems (UPSs) solar PV systems and generators.

The PMP system - a technological ‘first’ for the SA market - is based on the universally-accepted principle of the Internet of Things (IoT) in which the Internet is linked to the physical world through any number of sensors which have the ability – and the true functionality - to radically change the way people manage their lives and businesses through resource optimisation.

The PMP launch was further energised by the presence of keynote speaker Chris Yelland, the MD of EE Publishers and an acknowledged expert commentator on SA’s power industry.

Highlighting the frequent power outages experienced by electricity consumers across the country, he said they were not caused by a lack of capacity (as they were in the days of load-shedding), but by the poor maintenance of Eskom’s aging and now increasingly unreliable grid infrastructure.

Yelland noted that Eskom’s vertically-integrated model of coal-fired electricity generation had not changed in 90 years, even though the parastatal’s monopoly is being challenged by independent power producers. He said Eskom is facing disruptive new technologies, such as solar power at ever-decreasing cost, and new-generation energy storage solutions such as the Tesla battery.

He said SA should move away from centralised planning to a market-driven model for power generation and create more opportunities for distributed generation, rather than produce most of its power on the Highveld.

In my presentation, I highlighted some of the results culled from a research project involving a large South African chain of 90 retail stores country-wide in which more than 80 hours of costly power outages were recorded during one month. Fortunately, the most damaging effects of these losses were successfully avoided due to competently-performing standby power solutions.

Not all organisations are so well equipped or prepared.

The research brought to light a key problem: Business owners are generally unaware of how effective (or ineffective) their standby systems are and how bad the consequences of power outages can be unless they have a significant deep insight into the operating effectiveness of these critical resources on a 24x7 basis - as delivered so cost-efficiently by the ground-breaking PMP system.

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