During VPP testing we discovered that one of our generator circuit breakers operated intermittently and wouldn’t always close. This meant that when both of our backup generators were required tosupply hospital demand, the hospital’s supply redundancy could have been compromised if the breaker didn’t close. Once the fault was identified, the ‘sticky’ breaker was replaced.
We have a lot of electronic equipment that's sensitive to things like voltage spikes and frequency deviations. We set parameters on our incoming equipment, so that if the grid’s frequency deviates, we switch to our generator. VPP participation became a hand in glove approach for us, it meant we were able to get paid for doing the same thing we already were.
As we’re running our generators on load [in VPP participation], we can defer our weekly test for another week, because we've proven that we've met the required standard to test them on load.