Film and Television Services (FTVS) used this week’s MPTS in London to unveil its new mobile power generator, which the company says “delivers sustainable Swiss army knife power redundancy to the industry”.
“It’s all about a new direction for mobile power,” says Paul Williams, strategy business executive, FTVS. “It’s quite unique in the sense of the tech that it’s got and what it delivers. It’s not just about delivering a fossil fuel, it’s about batteries, fossil fuel and redundancy.”
Designed to operate either as a stand-alone unit or intelligently integrate multiple power inputs, the unit has 360kWh of stored energy on-board and can accept multiple grid inputs. In scenarios where there are insufficient or no grid supplies available it can be powered by the dual 100kVA Stage V generators, enabling N+1 redundancy.
“It’s like a Swiss Army knife, because this could rock up into a field and if the battery is fully charged when it arrives, it could charge whatever power draws coming in, deliver it, and then the two Stage V generators would kick in and add to that battery charge,” explains Peter Ward, head of operations, FTVS. “So you could sit in the middle of a field with nothing attached to it, and deliver power. Generators can do that, but they’re obviously emitting emissions.”
While there are other standard battery products available, this new unit works in a different way, explains Dave Watson, general manager of FTVS. “The architecture in this is completely different to what you can currently get. The way we view this truck is that the battery is actually an energy source, that is what’s providing the power that forms the grid, and then you just top up the battery from various other sources.”
The hybrid unit is capable of sustaining up to a 25kW load for 10 hours without the need for a grid supply or running of the Stage V generators. It is said to reduce generator runtime by approximately 50% and C02 emissions by 40%. The drive for more sustainable solutions across the industry was central to its development.
Ward explains: “The industry needed to make a big change. We’d already been supporting customers through the move away from diesel to GTL to HVO. It was the right direction to be taken, but customers couldn’t really find what they needed out there. So we listened to what people needed, what their drives and goals were, and then went away to go and design something that spoke to those needs.”
Watson adds: “There’s a general industry drive for more sustainable solutions, but the challenge has always been maintaining the level of redundancy required with more sustainable options. So that’s been the big challenge until we built this, which is fully redundant up to 100kW.
“It’s all about redundancy. We were adamant not to build something that would not hit the same level of performance because that’s the basis of the reputation of FTVS.”
Ward agrees: “When you bring new technology to the market, if it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, it gets set back a long way as people aren’t willing to take any risks or move forward with it. So we knew when we were going to bring something out that we had to make sure it met all of our standards that we had reputationally built up.
“Building this has been a good journey and I think we’re confident that what is here now is the right solution, and it’s future proofed.”
