Aurora Power Consulting was contracted by Capita Property & Infrastructure  to review the protection settings of an existing large, secure data centre within the UK.

Aurora’s scope was to review the existing system configuration and base data to create an overall model of the system using ETAP. Once created Aurora ran a large number of different loadflow and short circuit cases to identify the system behavior and fault current distribution under normal, outage and emergency scenarios. Once the system behavior was clearly understood for all operating cases, Aurora then reviewed and updated all the protection settings, for the whole system, using both main and alternate settings groups for different operating cases. .

Aurora recognised that these type of protection studies are of key importance to critical infrastructure projects and spent a significant amount of time with the Client to understand the systems operation and configuration, so that every conceivable operating condition and failure mode could be considered. This resulted in Aurora producing over 50 Time Current Curves, and a detailed 100 page technical report.

The plant consisted of two incoming 11kV utility connections, a large redundant 11kV cable distribution system, extensive standby generation and a complex system of  UPSs to supply the data halls.