A survey on power quality cost in industrial customers

Abstract

The problem of the power quality (PQ) cost in industrial customers is particularly important at present in the new scenery of competitive electricity markets. In fact, it represents the added value that the electric suppliers can provide to the users for improving their productivity and the reliability of their industrial process. The industry must compare the cost of the PQ services provided by the utilities with the cost derived from damage to the production output and/or to the plants. While this latter is easy to define because it is related to the physical replacement of some equipment, the cost of production losses is not simple to monetize. The paper refers to a survey that has been conducted on medium-large factories in Italian industrialized areas, with the goal to identify the type of disturbances that generate productivity losses and to estimate the relevant damage.