LOCAL POWER: Wyoming shop to help power military

Coffman Electric Equipment Company is part of the Advanced Mobile MicroGrid Power System project:

"When you get in a foreign country, if they have poor power quality, you can take any voltage, any frequency, put it into our package and get computer-grade output power," Dick Coffman, president of Coffman Electric, said.

"It's not a power source; it's a power conversion device," he said.

The $1.4 million prototype is called an Electronic Power Control and Conditioning system.

It can accept DC voltages from 24 to 600 volts, or alternating electric current at 50, 60 or 400 herz.

"We can take all these power feeds simultaneously and combine them, then come out with data-center-grade power. To our knowledge, this has never been done before," Coffman said.

Preliminary tests are scheduled for next month and production could begin within two years.