5 MWh Battery Lasts Just 308 Seconds Against a 50 MW Datacenter Load

A simulation from the open-source Datacenter Twin Lab project illustrates how quickly a 5 MWh battery depletes under a 50 MW IT load when a generator fails to start. Accounting for 90% discharge efficiency and 95% distribution efficiency, only 4,275 kWh of the stored 5,000 kWh actually reaches IT equipment, providing roughly 307.8 seconds of ride-through. Since the simulated utility outage begins at 300 seconds, the battery is fully depleted at 607.8 seconds into the run. With utility power not restored until 900 seconds, the scenario results in a 292.2-second service gap and over 4,058 kWh of unserved energy. The example, reproducible via a public GitHub repository using Python 3.12, is designed to make energy accounting transparent before more complex failure scenarios are modeled.
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