PT Comunicações is the largest landline operator in Portugal. From its headquarters in Lisbon, it delivers telephony services to more than four million people. It is also part of the Portugal Telecom (PT) group, the largest provider of communications and multimedia services in Portugal and Brazil, with a significant presence in Morocco, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Timor-Leste, Angola, Kenya, China, São Tomé and Príncipe.
Cummins Power Generation has been supplying power solutions to PT Comunicações for many years. In fact, the company currently uses more than 100 Cummins Power Generation generator sets across its network, mainly for standby power in case of mains failure.
Standby power Most recently the company required a standby system for its office in the heart of Lisbon, to provide standby support for the business's mainframes, workstations, communications networks, servers, cable communications and multimedia service. Once again it turned to Cummins Power Generation and local distributor, Electro Central Vulcanizadora (ECV), for the solution.
ECV fought off competition from CAT, Wartsila and DEUTZ to supply four Cummins Power Generation C2500 D5A generator sets, providing 15 MVA of standby power. The system, which was designed by ECV, includes unique master controls with redundancy, two internal PLCs, each with HMI and the capability for one of four PLCs taking control, a bespoke building management system, switchgear, transfer switches and remote monitoring. It will operate approximately 30 minutes per week as well as being called upon to provide backup power during mains failure.
The PT Comunicações headquarters is a 13-floor office building with shops at its base. ECV therefore had to consider residential issues such as noise pollution, which could not exceed 70 dBA at 1m, and vibrations of less than 5%-10%, when specifying and designing the power system.
Engineer Hugo Santos from PT Comunicações says: “The Cummins Power Generation C2500 D5A generator sets not only met the specialist environmental requirements of the project but also provided the most flexible control manually, automatically or remotely.”
Fernando Pinzon of Cummins Power Generation says: “PT Comunicações has been a long and loyal customer and we are therefore pleased to be able to continue to offer product solutions that meet their individual power needs. The flexibility of our products, coupled with the design capability of ECV has really helped the success of this project and we hope to work closely with PT Comunicações for many years to come.”
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