The National Information Resources Service secured 109.6 billion won as a budget to replace aging equipment, but it was reported on the 29th that this did not include the expense to replace batteries past their service life. The National Information Resources Service fire broke out while moving batteries whose service life had expired by one year. Experts said aging batteries can be a cause of fires.
The National Information Resources Service under the Ministry of the Interior and Safety was allocated 118.6 billion won this year to prevent disruptions to digital administrative services. The largest share went to "replacement of aging equipment," with 109.6 billion won assigned.
The replacement targets included servers, storage, and network equipment. Batteries were excluded. The issue is that the National Information Resources Service's lithium-ion batteries for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) were installed in Aug. 2014 and, at the time of the fire, had exceeded the recommended service life (10 years) by more than a year. LG CNS, the battery sales and maintenance company, also reportedly recommended replacement after a June inspection last year, saying the time for battery replacement had arrived.
An official at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, "It is true that we received a recommendation to replace the (batteries)," but noted, "It was a routine recommendation based on elapsed time, so we judged they could be used for another one to two years."
On this, a person in the IT (information technology) industry operating a data center said, "Aging batteries pose a fire risk, so we treat them as a top priority for replacement," adding, "The battery service life and replacement expense should have been considered first in the budgeting process."