Don’t let power outages ground your business

 

 

You may not have heard what caused last week’s Delta Airlines computer shutdown that grounded 15,000 flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers worldwide for more than 24 hours. It was a local power outage in the part of Atlanta where Delta is headquartered.

There’s a lesson for businesses of all sizes in this: You never know when or where a power outage can occur. You do know that when it does, it can make your business as dead as Delta’s was.

 

Your business doesn’t have 15,000 passenger flights throughout the world each day. And it doesn’t bring in $5.9 billion a year in adjusted pre-tax income. But the smaller your business, the more devastating a full-day outage can be. Continue reading “Don’t let power outages ground your business”

There’s no telling when the power will go out – or why

Power outages can happen at the worst times and for the strangest reasons.

Take the morning of Friday, September 20, when the new iPhone5 was set to go on sale.

It was minutes before 8 AM in Bethesda, MD. A line of customers, eager to buy, stretched from the door of the Apple store all the way around the block. As the Wall Street Journal Washwire blog posted,

…just moments before the suburban Washington store was set to open at 8 a.m., the power went out, according to buyers’ and local news reporters’ posts on Twitter. A call to the Apple store went unanswered. Local power company Pepco later confirmed there was a power outage.

In fact, the power went out for the whole block that the would-be iPhone buyers were lined up around. “Whole block went dark,” one of them tweeted.

The outage’s cause was just as strange as its timing. “A squirrel made contact with our equipment and caused a fault,” @PepcoConnect tweeted. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Squirrels have been causing lots of outages recently. They keep knocking out the power in downtown Lynchburg, VA, for example, costing consumers time and businesses lost sales – and that’s more than an “inconvenience.”

Of course, if the Bethesda Apple store, or the Lynchburg downtown merchants, had Milestone Solar systems with battery backup, the outage wouldn’t have inconvenienced them one bit.

The lights would have stayed on, the doors open. They’d have been able to ring up sales and earn profits. And if the outage had been a long one, the sealed battery backup bank would have been recharging every second the sun was in the sky.

If a constant power supply matters to you, contact us for a free solar, consultation and learn more about our battery backup. After all, you never know when a squirrel might strike again.

 

 

A squirrel leaves downtown Lynchburg powerless

Yesterday morning, a squirrel knocked out electrical power along Main, Commerce and Twelve Streets in Lynchburg, VA.

According to WSET-TV, some 1,159 Appalachian Power customers – not just homes, but also downtown businesses – were without electricity for hours. Even downtown traffic lights were knocked out.

Lots of things can cause outages – high winds that knock down power lines, snow storms that ice up the lines and break them, even a random squirrel.

But whatever the cause, if an outage hits your area, a Milestone Solar system with backup battery bank will keep your lights on, day and night. With no flammable fuels, no toxic gas emissions. And with automatic recharging from a dependable power source that rises every morning.

Not just for Virginia homes

The Roanoke Times reports that starting a few weeks from now, a solar array will provide the Salem, Virginia, Veteran Affairs Medical Center  with 1,620 kilowatts of free electricity – about 10% of their power needs.

Another VA hospital, in Alexandria, has a 1,995 kilowatt solar system under construction.

The Norfolk Naval Station gets 2100 kilowatts from its solar system.

Washington and Lee University and Virginia Tech also save on electric bills with solar power (450 and 103 kilowatts, respectively).

At Milestone Solar, we’ve been helping commercial customers offset as much as 50% of their electric bills with

  • a 37.4 kilowatt solar installation for the Ernst Market in Clear Spring, Maryland (20% offset).
  • a 15.87 kW solar array for the Town of Man, West Virginia, town hall (50%).
  • a 5.04 kW solar system for the Beech Bottom, WV, town hall (more than 50%).

So if you run a business, are concerned about your bottom line and overhead, and thought that solar electricity was just for houses, it pays to think again.