Saft wins Brazilian battery backup deal - Nickel Cadmium

French battery company Saft has won a contract to design, manufacture and supply backup battery systems for all 34 distribution substations serving Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia.

The contract has been awarded by Brazilian utility CEB and the Saft Uptimax batteries will replace the existing lead-acid batteries at the substations. This, says Saft, will “provide a significant increase in reliability and availability while reducing battery maintenance and replacement costs”.

Brasilia is the federal capital of Brazil and CEB controls electric power distribution, generation and transmission assets covering an area of over 5280 square kilometres.

Saft said that the substation backup batteries will play a critical role for CEB “by ensuring a continuous 125 V supply to support all the auxiliary loads such as switchgear, automation and protection circuits for up to 10 hours if there is an interruption to the main power supply”.

Previously, the substations have been fitted with lead-acid batteries. However, this is a particularly demanding application with ambient temperatures reaching + 35°C that contribute to the risk of unpredictable, premature battery failure.

“Ensuring continuity of customer supply is a mission critical aspect of CEB’s power distribution business,” said Arthur Franklin, substations maintenance manager at CEB. “That’s why we have made the decision to purchase nickel backup batteries for the first time in our company history.”

“This switch gives us renewed confidence that our substation backup systems will always perform as required, whenever they are called upon.”

article found on powerengineeringint.com