Investment and ROI on Batteries

The issue of investment for the back-up power storage is mostly hidden in the cost of the entire UPS system during the first purchase. Thereafter battery replacements are left under the office maintenance budget, thereby making it extremely difficult for ascertaining the spend on batteries and the associated return.In the lifespan of the UPS, a battery is bought on an average three times ( average life span of 2.5 years). This makes the study of battery economics an interesting one. Consider the following case: As is outlined in the table, the total lifetime investment for batteries is nearly twice that for the UPS. Given this scenario, batteries should be given significant importance, which any other IT hardware gets for the same lifetime investment.

The ROI on the back-up power storage is a little difficult to compute. Since batteries support other system like UPS and are dependent on them for their usage, an independent ROI on batteries is not feasible. However, for sure, one can work towards reducing the total lifetime cost by maximizing

the life of the existing battery bank. On the other hand, using Power Outage Analysis test as well as statistical techniques, it is possible to determine the net contribution to uptime from the battery to the IT infrastructure.