Mining and Resources UPS and Cooling Australia
Industry Solutions / Mining and Resources
Critical Power and Cooling for Australian Mine Sites and Remote Resources Operations
A standard VRLA UPS battery loses roughly half its design life for every 10 degrees C it sits above 25 degrees C, so a five-year battery in an uncooled Pilbara switchroom running at 40 degrees C will typically be finished inside two years, which is why mine site UPS in Australia has to be specified around ambient temperature before anything else. Indigi Power and Cooling designs, supplies, installs and maintains UPS, battery and precision cooling systems for mining and resources sites across Australia, from switchroom and comms shelter power through to high ambient condenser selection and fly-in fly-out service scheduling.
Mine site power protection fails for reasons that almost never appear on a manufacturer data sheet. The UPS is usually the right topology and the right size. What kills it is a switchroom that sits at 42 degrees C through a Queensland summer, iron ore fines working past a filter that was rated for an office, a generator supply that wanders outside the input window twice a shift, and a service interval that was copied from a Brisbane office contract and applied to a site nine hours from the nearest branch.
The consequence is not just replacement cost. A battery string that has quietly lost capacity looks healthy on a front panel until the moment it is needed, and the moment it is needed at a mine site is usually the moment a haul road lighting circuit, a gas monitoring head or a radio repeater goes dark. Loss of communications underground or loss of a control system on a processing circuit is a safety event before it is a production event.
Indigi Power and Cooling is an Indigenous and Veteran owned critical power and cooling specialist, registered with Supply Nation and ICN Gateway. We work across both the electrical and the mechanical side of mine site critical infrastructure, because at these sites they are inseparable. The single largest determinant of how long your UPS batteries last is the temperature of the room they sit in, and that is a cooling question, not a UPS question.
Ambient temperature is the number that decides everything
Valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) battery ageing follows the Arrhenius relationship, which in practical terms means the chemical reactions that degrade the plates roughly double in rate for every 10 degrees C increase in cell temperature. The industry rule of thumb used by every major UPS battery manufacturer is that service life halves for each 10 degrees C above the 25 degrees C reference condition. The table below applies that rule to a battery with a five-year design life, which is the most common specification in a small to mid-size mine site UPS.
| Sustained ambient | VRLA expected life | Lithium (LFP) outlook | Typical Australian setting |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 degrees C | 6 to 7 years | 10 to 15 years | Well cooled control room with redundant air conditioning |
| 25 degrees C | 5 years, the reference condition | 10 to 15 years | Properly designed switchroom holding setpoint |
| 30 degrees C | About 3.5 years | Minimal reduction | Switchroom with a single air conditioner and no redundancy |
| 35 degrees C | About 2.5 years | Modest reduction, still well beyond VRLA | Comms shelter or donga with ventilation only |
| 40 degrees C | Under 2 years | Within normal operating range for most LFP UPS batteries | Pilbara or Mount Isa switchroom on a failed air conditioner |
| 45 degrees C | About 15 months | At or near the upper limit, check the specific cell rating | Unconditioned plant room or roof mounted enclosure in summer |
| 50 degrees C | Under 12 months, and thermal runaway risk rises sharply | Outside the operating envelope of most systems | Sealed enclosure in direct sun with no active cooling |
Two things follow from this table, and both change how a site should be quoted. The first is that cooling a switchroom from 40 degrees C down to 25 degrees C more than doubles battery life, which usually pays for the air conditioning several times over across the life of the asset. The second is that if you genuinely cannot hold 25 degrees C, then buying a cheaper VRLA string is a false economy, because you will buy it again before the next planned shutdown comes around.
The trap is that nothing alarms. A degraded VRLA string holds float voltage perfectly and reports no fault. Capacity loss is only visible through impedance testing or a load test. On a hot remote site, a string can pass a visual inspection in March and fail to carry the load in April. This is why impedance trending, not visual inspection, is the meaningful maintenance activity at high ambient sites.
Why lithium is increasingly specified for remote sites
Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) costs more up front than VRLA and is not automatically the right answer. On a remote mine site, however, three of its properties line up unusually well with the actual problem.
Fewer replacement events, which is really a logistics saving
A ten to fifteen year design life against a realistic two to three years for VRLA at these temperatures means the difference between one battery event in the life of the plant and five or six. Each of those avoided events is a mobilisation, a licensed technician on a flight, accommodation, a dangerous goods freight movement in and a spent lead acid movement out. On a site where a single trip costs more than the batteries, the whole life cost comparison stops being close.
Genuine high temperature tolerance
Most UPS grade LFP systems carry a normal operating range that extends to 40 degrees C or beyond, and critically they do not suffer the same steep exponential ageing penalty across that range that lead acid does. That does not mean lithium is indifferent to heat, and you should still cool the room. It means the failure mode when cooling is lost for a week is degraded life rather than a destroyed string.
Weight and footprint for fly-in maintenance
An LFP battery system is typically 60 to 70 per cent lighter than the VRLA string it replaces for the same runtime, and occupies substantially less floor area. That matters when the batteries have to be flown in on a charter, carried into a comms shelter by two people, or fitted into a container that was never designed with a battery rack in mind. It also removes the floor loading conversations that come with a large lead acid installation on a modular building.
The fourth advantage is less obvious and arguably the most useful at a remote site. Every LFP system carries a battery management system that reports cell level state of health continuously. Instead of discovering the condition of a string on a six-monthly visit, you can trend it from Perth or Brisbane and dispatch a technician when the data says so, rather than when the calendar says so. Read more on chemistry selection and enclosure design on our high temperature UPS systems for hot and outdoor environments page.
Dust, IP ratings and what they actually mean on a plant
IP ratings are defined in AS 60529, and the two digits are read separately. The first digit describes protection against solid objects and dust, the second describes protection against water. On a mine site the first digit is the one that determines whether your UPS survives, and the difference between a 5 and a 6 in that position is more consequential than most specifications acknowledge.
| Rating | Dust protection | Water protection | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|---|
| IP54 | Dust protected. Limited ingress is permitted provided it does not interfere with operation. Dust will get in. | Splashing water from any direction | Sheltered switchrooms and control rooms where the room itself is sealed and air conditioned |
| IP55 | Dust protected, same limitation as IP54 | Low pressure water jets from any direction, which covers most washdown | Processing plant areas subject to hose down, covered but not enclosed locations |
| IP65 | Dust tight. No ingress of dust at all, which is a different standard, not a stronger version of the same one. | Low pressure water jets from any direction | Genuinely exposed outdoor locations, crusher and conveyor areas, iron ore and coal fines environments |
The honest trade-off, and the point competitor pages omit, is that a dust tight enclosure cannot breathe. An IP65 cabinet has no path for ambient air to carry heat away, so every watt the UPS and batteries reject stays inside it. That forces you into an enclosure air conditioner or an air to air heat exchanger, which adds a cooling load, an electrical load and another item on the maintenance schedule. Specifying IP65 without specifying how the enclosure is cooled is how a well-intentioned dust specification ends up cooking the batteries it was meant to protect.
Vibration is the quieter version of the same problem. Equipment mounted near crushers, mills, conveyor drives or on modular buildings adjacent to blast areas loses terminal torque over time. Battery terminal connections and busbar joints should be torque checked and thermographically scanned at every visit, because a loose high current joint in a dusty environment is a fire risk long before it is a reliability issue.
Unstable grid, generator supply and input voltage window
Australian nominal supply is 230 V under AS 60038, but a remote site rarely sees anything resembling nominal. Long feeders from a site power station, large motor starts on a processing circuit, variable speed drive harmonics and diesel generator governor response all combine to produce a supply that moves constantly. Two specifications determine whether the UPS copes or spends its life on battery.
- Input voltage window. A good industrial online double conversion UPS will accept roughly 160 V to 280 V at full load without transferring to battery, and wider still at reduced load. A narrower window means the UPS treats normal site voltage sag as a mains failure and cycles the batteries, which at 40 degrees C is exactly the wrong thing to be doing to them.
- Input frequency window and generator mode. Standard UPS input frequency tolerance is often plus or minus 3 Hz. A diesel generator taking a block load will excurse further than that on recovery. If the UPS rejects the generator, it stays on battery while a perfectly serviceable genset runs behind it. Any mine site UPS should have a widened generator mode, typically plus or minus 6 Hz or better, with a controlled walk-in of the rectifier so the UPS does not slam the genset with a step load the moment it accepts it.
- Input power factor and harmonics. Specify a rectifier with active power factor correction at 0.99 and input current distortion under 5 per cent. On a generator backed site this directly reduces the generator oversizing factor, and the saving on generator capacity is usually larger than the price difference between rectifier technologies.
Two Australian regulator publications are worth knowing before you connect anything. NSW Resources issued safety bulletin SB17-04 on uninterruptible power supply installations at mines, which makes the point that not all UPS installations are suitable for connection to mine site electrical installations and recommends that UPS installations be audited by a suitably qualified engineer as part of routine planned maintenance. Queensland Resources Safety and Health has separately issued an alert on the hazard of backfeed from some UPS units, following an electric shock at a mine. Both point at the same underlying issue, which is that a UPS is a source of supply that can energise a circuit an isolation procedure assumes is dead. Isolation points, labelling and lockout procedures need to reflect that, and all installation work is carried out to AS/NZS 3000 alongside the applicable state mining electrical safety requirements.
Cooling switchrooms, comms shelters and control rooms at high ambient
Everything above depends on holding a room temperature, and holding a room temperature in the Pilbara in February is a genuinely different engineering problem from holding one in Melbourne. The critical variable, and the one that is most often specified incorrectly, is condenser selection.
Most standard direct expansion equipment is rated and published at an outdoor design ambient of around 35 degrees C. Capacity falls as outdoor ambient rises, and beyond a certain point head pressure protection will trip the compressor entirely. Design dry bulb conditions in the Pilbara, the Goldfields and inland Queensland regularly exceed 43 degrees C, and a roof or hardstand mounted condenser sitting in radiant heat with recirculating discharge air can be presented with an effective on-coil temperature well above the shade air temperature. The practical result is that a nominally adequate unit delivers materially less capacity precisely on the days it is most needed, which is the day the switchroom hits 45 degrees C and the batteries start their real ageing.
What this means for specification is straightforward. Select condensers rated for high ambient operation, apply the manufacturer capacity derating tables at the actual site design condition rather than the catalogue condition, allow generous condenser airflow clearance with no discharge recirculation, and account for solar gain on the enclosure or building fabric as a separate load. On a modular building or container the fabric gain is frequently larger than the equipment load inside it.
Size the internal load honestly as well. A UPS is not a passive device thermally. An online double conversion UPS running at 95 per cent efficiency rejects about 5 per cent of throughput as heat into the room, so a 100 kVA unit carrying 90 kW of load puts roughly 4.7 kW of continuous heat into the switchroom on top of whatever the switchgear, transformers and IT equipment contribute, and more again while it is recharging batteries after an outage. Where a switchroom or comms shelter also carries IT and network equipment, supply air should sit within the ASHRAE TC 9.9 recommended envelope of 18 to 27 degrees C at the equipment inlet.
Redundancy is not a luxury at these sites. A single air conditioner serving a switchroom is a single point of failure whose failure mode is the destruction of a battery string, and on a remote site the repair may be a week away. N+1 on switchroom cooling, with automatic changeover and duty rotation, is the correct baseline. All refrigerant work is carried out by ARCtick licensed technicians under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Regulations, and where mechanical ventilation serves occupied control rooms the hygiene requirements of AS/NZS 3666 apply. More detail on room level design is on our switchroom cooling Australia page.
Service logistics, intervals and spares for remote sites
A twelve month service interval is a sensible default for an air conditioned metropolitan plant room. Applied without thought to a site running at 40 degrees C, it is close to meaningless. If the battery string has a realistic service life under two years, an annual visit inspects it roughly once before it is due for replacement, which leaves no window in which to detect degradation and plan the change out. The interval has to follow the environment, not the contract template.
| Site environment | UPS service interval | Battery activity | Spares held on site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air conditioned admin or IT room, near a town | 12 months | Annual impedance test and torque check | Filters only |
| Cooled switchroom, moderate dust, drive-in access | 6 to 12 months | Impedance trending at every visit | Filters, fans, one spare battery block |
| High ambient switchroom or plant area, heavy dust | 6 months, aligned to shutdown blocks | Impedance trending plus thermographic scan of all joints | Filters, fans, full battery set staged ahead of forecast replacement |
| Fly-in only, comms shelter or remote repeater | Combined power and cooling visit, scheduled to the site access window | Remote monitoring with lithium BMS telemetry where possible, physical test at each visit | Complete replacement modules, because a return trip is the cost |
Two practical rules make remote service work economically. Combine scope, so power and cooling are attended in a single mobilisation by technicians carrying both trades, and schedule against the site calendar rather than the anniversary of the purchase order, so work lands inside planned maintenance blocks and shutdowns instead of competing with production. We build maintenance programmes this way as standard, and can attach them to existing UPS maintenance plans or battery maintenance and replacement scope.
What Indigi does on a mining or resources site
Site assessment against real conditions
Measured switchroom and enclosure temperatures, power quality logging on the incoming supply, battery impedance baseline and an honest position on what your current plant will survive.
UPS supply and installation
Single and three phase online double conversion systems with wide input windows, generator mode, VRLA or lithium battery selection and IP rated enclosures where the location demands it.
High ambient cooling design
Switchroom, comms shelter and control room cooling selected at the actual site design condition, with derated condenser capacity, N+1 redundancy and ARCtick licensed installation.
Remote maintenance programmes
Combined power and cooling visits scheduled to shutdown blocks, spares strategy set to the cost of a return trip, and monitoring integration over Modbus or SNMP into your existing SCADA.
Indicative pricing gives you a starting position before we quote against your site. Single phase UPS installation starts from $850 up to 3 kVA, $1,250 for 3 to 10 kVA and $1,800 for 10 to 20 kVA. Three phase installation starts from $3,200 for small systems and $6,500 for medium systems. UPS maintenance is $720 ex GST for a one-off visit or $1,940 per year ex GST on a standard annual plan. Cooling design and installation runs from $8,000 to $15,000 for small rooms, $25,000 to $45,000 for medium installations and $45,000 to $60,000 plus for large projects. Remote sites are quoted with mobilisation identified separately so you can see the travel component and decide how to bundle scope against it.
Frequently asked questions
What is mining UPS?
A mining UPS is an uninterruptible power supply specified for the conditions found at a mine site rather than an office. Functionally it does the same job as any UPS, holding critical loads through mains disturbances and outages, but it is built and selected differently. That usually means a wide input voltage and frequency window so it tolerates unstable remote grid and generator supply, an enclosure with an appropriate IP rating for dust, batteries chosen for the ambient temperature they will actually experience, and vibration tolerant mounting. Typical loads are switchroom control systems, SCADA and PLCs, gas and ventilation monitoring, radio and network communications, and site security and access control.
What is the safe operating temperature for UPS?
Most UPS electronics are rated to operate from 0 to 40 degrees C, with some industrial units extended to 50 degrees C, often with a capacity derating applied above 40 degrees C. The batteries are the limiting factor, not the electronics. VRLA batteries have a reference temperature of 25 degrees C and degrade rapidly above it, so the safe operating temperature for the UPS as a system is effectively the safe operating temperature for its batteries. Design the room to 25 degrees C even where the UPS itself would tolerate more.
What is the ambient temperature that should be maintained to extend the life of an UPS?
25 degrees C, or slightly below. That is the reference condition against which VRLA battery life is rated, and every 10 degrees C above it roughly halves that life. Holding 20 to 25 degrees C typically delivers the full five year design life from a five year battery, while allowing the room to sit at 35 degrees C cuts it to around two and a half years and 40 degrees C brings it under two. Aim to hold a stable setpoint rather than chasing the lowest possible temperature, because temperature cycling brings its own problems and the marginal gain below 20 degrees C is small.
Does high temperature affect battery life?
Yes, more than any other single factor. Heat accelerates the internal chemical reactions that degrade a battery, following the Arrhenius relationship, which in practice means VRLA service life halves for every 10 degrees C above 25 degrees C. High temperature also accelerates grid corrosion and electrolyte dry-out in sealed lead acid cells and increases the risk of thermal runaway. Lithium iron phosphate tolerates elevated temperature considerably better across its normal operating range, which is a large part of why it is now commonly specified for hot and remote Australian sites.
Does UPS emit heat?
Yes, continuously. An online double conversion UPS running at around 95 per cent efficiency rejects roughly 5 per cent of the power passing through it as heat, so a 100 kVA unit carrying 90 kW of load adds about 4.7 kW of heat to the room whenever it is running, and more while it is recharging batteries after an outage. This has to be included in the cooling load calculation for the switchroom. Sizing room cooling on the IT and switchgear load alone, and forgetting the UPS and its charger, is one of the more common reasons a switchroom runs hotter than it was designed to.
What are the optimal environmental conditions for a room containing UPS equipment?
A stable 20 to 25 degrees C, relative humidity around 40 to 60 per cent, filtered air with dust and corrosive gas kept out, and enough clearance around the equipment for the manufacturer's specified airflow. Where the same room holds IT or network equipment, supply air should meet the ASHRAE TC 9.9 recommended envelope of 18 to 27 degrees C at the equipment inlet. On a mine site add two more requirements: redundant cooling, because a single air conditioner failure at a remote location can run for days before anyone attends, and positive pressure with filtered make-up air so fines are pushed out of the room rather than drawn into it.
What is a mining power supply?
The term covers the whole chain that delivers power to a mine site, which on a remote operation is often independent of the grid. That typically includes a site power station of diesel or gas generation, increasingly paired with solar and battery energy storage, high voltage reticulation to substations across the lease, transformers and switchrooms at each plant area, and then the low voltage distribution and UPS layer that protects control, communications and safety systems. Indigi works at the critical load end of that chain, covering the UPS, battery and cooling infrastructure that keeps control rooms, switchrooms and communications equipment running when the upstream supply is interrupted.
Where we work
Brisbane and QLD
Brisbane CBD, Woolloongabba, Eight Mile Plains, Port of Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Townsville, Cairns
National HQ at Tingalpa, and the base for Bowen Basin coal and Mount Isa work. High summer ambient and long haul access make combined power and cooling visits the sensible unit of work here.
Sydney and NSW
Sydney CBD, Parramatta, North Ryde, Macquarie Park, Western Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Canberra (ACT)
Hunter Valley coal and the Newcastle port corridor, where NSW Resources safety bulletin SB17-04 on UPS installations at mines shapes how installations are audited and documented.
Melbourne and VIC
Melbourne CBD, Port Melbourne, Docklands, Dandenong, Tullamarine, Geelong, Ballarat, regional Victoria
Latrobe Valley energy infrastructure, quarrying and mineral sands, plus the corporate and technical offices that run remote operations centres for sites in other states.
Perth and WA
Perth CBD, Fremantle, Kalgoorlie, Pilbara, regional WA
Pilbara iron ore and the Goldfields around Kalgoorlie. The highest ambient design conditions in the country, where condenser derating and lithium battery selection matter most.
Adelaide and SA
Adelaide CBD, Port Adelaide, Salisbury, Mount Gambier, Whyalla, regional SA
The Iron Triangle around Whyalla, Port Augusta and Port Pirie, plus copper and uranium operations in the far north with long access drives and hot, dusty plant environments.
Darwin and NT
Darwin CBD, Palmerston, Katherine, Alice Springs, remote NT sites
High ambient combined with high humidity, which adds condensation and corrosion to the dust problem. Conformal coated boards and sealed, actively cooled enclosures earn their cost here.
Western Australia, Tasmania and Pacific Islands: we schedule remote site UPS, battery and cooling work in planned blocks around shutdown windows and site access rosters, and combine power and cooling scope into a single mobilisation so you pay for the trip once. Contact us to discuss scheduling.
Related services and equipment
- High temperature UPS systems for hot, industrial and outdoor environments
- Industrial power and cooling for processing plants, manufacturing and heavy industry
- Switchroom cooling Australia
- UPS battery maintenance and replacement
- UPS battery replacement cost calculator
- Three phase UPS maintenance Australia
- Single phase UPS installation and commissioning
- Power integrity inspection for sites with unstable supply
- Gas detection for battery rooms and BESS
- Data centres and IT infrastructure for remote operations centres and edge compute
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Tell us the site, and we will tell you what will actually survive there Send us the location, the switchroom or shelter conditions, the loads you need held, the supply arrangement and your access and shutdown windows. We will come back with a battery chemistry recommendation, a realistic service interval, a cooling position and an installed price with mobilisation shown separately. Indigi Power and Cooling is Indigenous and Veteran owned, and registered with Supply Nation and ICN Gateway. Contact Indigi Power and Cooling High Temperature UPS |
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