Boards give a great deal of attention to resilience, and most of it goes to things they can see. A new generator is approved as a capital item. A maintenance contract is negotiated and signed. A test schedule is agreed, the results are filed, and the auditor ticks the box. Each of these steps leaves a document behind, and documents are what governance runs on.
One part of the backup power system leaves almost no paperwork after the day it arrives. It sits in a steel tank beside or beneath the building, often for years, and every other part of the system depends on it when the grid goes down. It is the fuel.
Ask who in your organisation is responsible for the condition of that fuel, and the usual answer is a pause.
Who owns the stored fuel in a typical organisation?
Usually nobody. The standby generator belongs to facilities management and the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) belongs to the IT or data centre team, and each comes with a contract and a report. The diesel in the tank sits between those two departments. It is bought, signed for and then left without an owner.
| Standby generator | UPS (battery system) | Stored diesel fuel | |
| Usual owner | Facilities management | IT or data centre team | Often nobody |
| Paperwork | Service contract and service log | Battery health reports | A delivery note |
| Routine check | Scheduled test runs | Battery testing and replacement | A level reading, at most |
| On the risk register | Yes | Yes | Usually not |
Walk through a typical continuity arrangement and ownership is clear at almost every step. The generator has a named contractor who visits on a schedule. The UPS carries the load for the few minutes the generator needs to start. It has a replacement cycle and a line in someone’s budget.
The fuel falls between the two. Facilities treat it as a consumable that came with the generator. IT treats it as part of the generator and therefore somebody else’s concern. Procurement bought it once and moved on. The service contractor may check the level on each visit, but level and condition are different things, and condition is rarely in the scope of work anyone signed.
Nobody decided the fuel should go unmanaged. It ended up that way because it sits on the boundary between two departments, and boundaries are where accountability tends to go missing. That makes this a governance gap first and an engineering problem second. The engineering is well understood. What is missing is a person whose job includes asking the question.
Why is stored fuel missing from the risk register?
Because most risk registers are compiled function by function. Facilities report on the generator, IT reports on the UPS, and each answer is accurate within its own boundary. Fuel condition falls outside both, so no function reports it, internal audit has no control to test, and the board never sees it.
The same blind spot repeats further up. Insurers and certification bodies ask whether the generator is tested, and the honest answer is yes. Fuel condition appears in nobody’s performance objectives, so nobody is rewarded for finding a problem with it and nobody is accountable when one surfaces.
The result is an asset that the continuity plan depends on completely and that is absent from every mechanism the organisation uses to oversee risk. The board has not been careless. The reporting lines that bring risk to the board simply have nowhere to put it.
What is the real risk with stored diesel?
The bigger risk is fuel that is present but unusable. Stored diesel degrades while it waits. It oxidises, it takes on water through condensation, microbes start to grow in that water, and the residue settles on the tank floor as sludge. The tank still reads full, yet the fuel can block filters as soon as the generator has to work hard.
When people picture fuel risk, they tend to picture losing the fuel: a leak, a theft, a delivery that cannot get through during a long outage. Those risks usually have owners, because they are easy to imagine. The risk without an owner is quieter. The fuel is in the tank, the volume is correct, and it will not run the engine.
The causes are ordinary. The tank breathes as the temperature rises and falls, and moisture from the air collects underneath the fuel. Where that water meets the fuel, microbes that arrive with every delivery begin to grow. Gums and fine sediment from slow oxidation add to the layer at the bottom.
None of it shows on the level gauge. The gauge measures how much liquid is in the tank and has no way of telling whether that liquid is still fit to burn. On paper the site holds its full reserve. In practice, part of that reserve has become the material that blocks filters.
Why doesn’t a passed generator test prove the fuel is fit?
A routine test runs the engine briefly at light load. It draws little fuel and leaves the sediment on the tank floor undisturbed. A real outage demands full load for hours, which pulls that sludge towards the outlet and blocks filters. The test confirms the engine works. It says very little about the fuel.
Most organisations take comfort from the generator test, and the test is genuine. The engine fires up, settles, shuts down on cue, and the log shows a pass.
An actual grid failure is a different event. The engine has to carry everything the building needs, and keep carrying it until the power returns. Fuel demand climbs, and filters that coped comfortably for a few minutes begin to block. The generator either fails to take the load or takes it and stops some time later. By then the batteries have used up most of the time they were installed to buy.
A board paper that reads “generator tested, passed” is an accurate statement about the wrong component.
What does fuel ownership look like in practice?
It needs three things: a named person responsible for fuel condition, regular laboratory evidence of that condition, and a line in the risk register so the results reach the board. Fuel polishing then keeps the fuel within specification between tests. None of this calls for a new department.
- A named owner. Fuel condition is written into one person’s responsibilities instead of being assumed to sit with someone else.
- Evidence. The stored fuel is tested periodically against the specification it was bought to, such as EN 590 in Europe or ASTM D975 in North America. The sample is taken at the lowest point in the tank, which is where water and sediment end up.
- Visibility. Fuel condition gets its own line in the risk register, next to the generator and the UPS.
NFPA 110, the standard many organisations follow for emergency and standby power, deals with fuel within the same framework as the generator it feeds. Governance should draw the same line.
Testing shows the condition of the fuel. Keeping it in good condition is a separate job. Fuel polishing is the regular circulation of stored diesel through filters and a water separator, so water and dirt are taken out before they can build up. On larger sites this is handled by permanently installed diesel fuel maintenance systems that run without anyone having to remember them. They feed their readings to the site’s central monitoring, so fuel condition shows up alongside the generator and the UPS. Once the condition is visible, someone can be held responsible for it.
Three questions for the next board meeting
None of these needs a consultant. Each can be put to management the next time business continuity is on the agenda.
When did anyone last send our fuel to a laboratory, and did the sample come from the tank floor? Fuel drawn halfway down can pass even when the bottom of the tank is in poor shape. If nobody can produce a test date at all, that is an answer in itself.
Do our generator tests ever push the engine to full load, for longer than a few minutes? If every test is short and lightly loaded, the organisation holds good evidence that the engine starts and very little about what happens after that.
Who owns the fuel? Ask for a person, not a department. If nobody in the room can name one, there is no need to wait for answers to the first two questions. The missing owner is the finding, and it explains the rest.
A question nobody was asked
Many governance failures look obvious in hindsight because the information existed and nobody was given the job of looking at it. Stored fuel is a clear case. The way it degrades is well documented, the standards that define it are published, and the remedies are routine. What most organisations lack is a name against it.
A service history for the generator and a battery report for the UPS give a board real confidence. Both of those machines are waiting on the same tank of fuel, and until someone owns that fuel, the confidence rests on an assumption nobody has checked.
Evergee is an Istanbul-based energy engineering company that builds fuel polishing and fuel maintenance equipment for sites where backup power has to work, such as data centres, hospitals and airports. Find out more at evergee.com.tr.
