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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Looking for advice on datacenter electrical/generator
At 07:42 PM 4/4/2003, Stephen Sprunk wrote: It's quite as simple to store propane as it is diesel. Propane stored on-site is stable, needs no cleaning, and the genset is the same as you'd use for natural gas. Given the choice between storing a large quantity of diesel and storing a large quantity of propane, I'd take propane. Other folks would argue the other way. Scared about fire reaching your propane tank? Use in-ground tanks. Unlike fuel oil or gasoline, buried propane tanks are allowed, at least in some places. Think about it... leaking propane tanks don't pollute the soil, they pollute the air.Thus spake "Bill Woodcock" <[email protected]> > On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Matthew Kaufman wrote: > > natural gas has been off for multiple days in a row twice. > > So for the last datacenter I built, I went with diesel. > > I'm not following your logic... How does the fact that natural gas > is _usually_ available on-tap, and diesel _never_ is make diesel > preferable? As noted by other posters, natural gas often goes out at the same times as electricity in some areas (e.g. California). In fact, many power companies use natural gas to generate electricity. Relying on one public utility to supplant another is not logical unless either you have historical data to satisfy you that outages in one are rarely linked to the other, or you can store natural gas onsite to run "long enough" and only need the utility to refill later. Though I'm in an area where interruption of gas service isn't really a problem, the availability of gas is. Some towns just don't have gas service. So, we store propane. Not a big deal. I suspect, though I've never seen it done, that it'd be possible to set up a gas genset with both a pressurized tank of fuel and a connection to the mains, with valves to switch between.
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