Affinity Energy – Infographic: Understanding the Impacts of Power Quality.
Understanding power quality issues
$15 billion is the annual cost of power quality issues. $130,000 are the potential costs for downtime in lost revenue for facilities. For mission critical facilities, that translates to $14,000 to $6.5 million every hour. It takes 17 hours for plants to restart after shutdown. You do the math.
- Did you know that 80% of power quality problems originate on the customer’s side of the meter or originate from within a facility?
- Did you know the 3-6% of manufacturing sales money is spent to correct PQ problems?
- Did you know 50% of mission-critical power outages attribute to power quality issues?
Typical power quality symptoms include:
- Flickering and blinking lights
- Transformer issues, such as noise, extra hot, or premature failure
- Panels, neutral wiring, and other distribution equipment running hot
- Printed circuit board failures in drives, PLCs, industrial PC, etc.
- Breaker trip and drive shutdown
- Premature motor failure and unexpected equipment shutdown
- Contactors dropping out
- Poor network communications
- Higher utility bills
- Poor power factor
- Low system capcity
Types of power quality issues include:
- RMS voltage variations (sags, swells, interruptions)
- Voltage transients (impulsives, oscillatory)
- Waveform distortion (harmonics, interharmonics, sub-harmonics)
- Voltage imbalance
- Voltage fluctuation
- Power frequency variation
The benefits of improving power quality include:
- Improved energy efficiency
- Reduced utility costs
- Reduced waste and improved operations
- Increased productivity
- Minimized downtime
- Increased equipment and power reliability
- Lower operating costs
The negative effects of PQ issues include:
- Energy losses
- Unplanned downtime
- Premature aging of equipment
- Utility penalties
- Decreased productivity
- Service call costs
- Decreased reliability
Ways to improve power quality include:
- Power factor correction
- Voltage stabilization
- Harmonic filtering
- Power conditioning
- Reactive power compensation
Source: https://affinityenergy.com/power-quality-infographic/
Power Quality Blog 