The UAE’s APT Construction Equipment Rental (ACE Power) and the UK’s Constant Power Solutions (CPS) have formed a strategic partnership to introduce, market and distribute CPS generators in the emirates.
The generators represent a new product line-up in the Middle East, and CPS will be relying on the experience of ACE Power as a provider of temporary power solutions with 13 years in the UAE power generation business.
Together, CPS and ACE Power will deliver generators with capacities ranging from 15KVA up to 1250kVA in single unit, as well as synchronised gensets for multi megawatt packages – all of them built to UK and EU quality standards.
ACE Power is also providing flexible rental/ownership arrangements, as Boben Mathew, GM at ACE Power, notes: “We are planning to provide ‘hire purchase’ and ‘rent to own’ options for large fleet owners that work in a similar way to rentals, but without requiring capital outflow.
“With the hire purchase option, you pay a 25% down payment, the balance paid over 12, 24 or 36 months, and you acquire the assets, or you can rent it normally, and at the end of 12, 24 or 36 months, you will have the option to purchase these units — adjusting a portion of your rental charges against its residual value.”
Among, the rental operator’s other efforts to reach out to the customer is its ‘power on demand’, where ACE Power assess the customer’s project requirements and provides a diesel generator size that best fits the customer’s modal load requirement, and caters to peaks in demand with additional synchronised units.
The setup then uses automatic load sharing and a load-dependent start-stop function to optimise both the power generated and the fuel consumed by the diesel generator combination.
So when the power demand on a lone generator reaches 60%-70%, a second generator comes online, and when their total output reaches 60-70%, a third generator comes online.
This is an alternative to a common practice in the region, which is to select a single genset that matches the peak demand of a project, but which is oversized for a large proportion of the time, using unnecessary fuel and potentially shortening the life of the gensets.
ACE Power’s system, by way of contrast, can reduce total fuel consumption by 30% to 40%.
Mathew comments: “The generator sizing is mainly based on our past experience of previous sites where, in many cases, we have come across diesel generators that are running at partial or low loads, and sometimes even less than 30% of its rated capacities. This is unsafe for the diesel generators and results in unnecessarily high energy costs and emissions.”
