Worldover, from manufacturing, utilities, production, offices to services. Energy is an essential raw material. Its costs a major critical issue in production of goods and services.

However, energy costs are escalating and not likely to go down, businesses are grasping on the best ways and means of cutting cost in their bid to remain competitive.

The cost of Power Quality (PQ)

One of such ways is the deployment of power quality techniques as a tool to achieving energy efficiency and solutions.

The global environment is competitive, optimal productivity is the key to survival and we shall look at the cost of power quality in facilities in other to enhance productivity and save on energy.

In production, the basic inputs are – Time, Labor and Materials– you can see there isn’t much room for optimization.

You have 24 hours per day, labor is costly, and you don’t have much choice in materials.

Thus, every enterprise must automate to gain more output from the same inputs or go under.

Automation is the way, and automation relies on clean power.

Poor Power Quality can cause processes and equipment to malfunction or shut down. The consequences include but not limited excessive energy costs (use), even upto complete work stoppage. Obviously, power quality is vital.

Because the systems are interdependent, it adds layer of complexity to Power issues.

Computers are fine, but the network is down so nobody can book a flight, trade on the stock exchange or file an expense report.

The process is operating correctly, but the HVAC has shut down and production must stop.

Mission-critical systems are everywhere in facilities and organizations – Power Quality problems can wreck any business and grind it to a halt at any time. And that will usually not the best of times.

Causes of power quality (PQ) problems?

About 90% of PQ problems originate inside the facility. They may be due to problems with:

• Poor Installation – improper grounding, improper routing, or undersized distribution.
• Operation – equipment operating outside of design parameters.
• Mitigation – improper shielding or lack of power factor correction.
• Maintenance- deteriorated cable insulation or grounding connections.

Even in a well designed, properly installed & maintained facility and equipment. Power Quality problems are introduced with ages.

Power quality problems can also originate from outside the facility.

We live in an era and  threat of unpredictable outages, voltage sags, and power surges. Obviously, there’s a cost here. How do you quantify it?

Evaluating Power Quality costs

The three general areas where effects of poor Power quality are felt;

• Downtime
• Equipment problems
• Energy costs.

Example.

Your factory makes 1,000 widgets per hour, and each widget produces $9 or revenue. Thus, your revenue per hour is $9,000. If your costs of production are $3,000 per hour, your operating income is $6,000 per hour when production is running.

When production is down, you lose $6,000 per hour of income and you still have to pay your fixed costs (eg, overhead and wages). That’s what it costs to be down. Nut downtime has other costs associated with it:

• Scrap. How much raw material or work in process do you have to throw away if a process goes down?
• Restart. How much does it cost to clean up and restart after an unplanned shutdown?
• Additional labor. Do you need to pay overtime or outsource work to respond to a downtime incident?

Downtime

In other to calculate system downtime costs, you need to know the following;

1. The revenue per hour your system produces.
2. The costs of production.

Consider critically your business process and answer the following questions.

• Is it a continuous, fully utilized process e.g a refinery?
• Must your product be consumed when produced e.g, a power plant?
• Can customers instantly switch to an alternative if the product is not available e.g a credit card?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then lost revenue is difficult or impossible to recover.

Are you a producer or service provider?

If you can’t make timely deliveries, your customers may switch to a source that can.

Equipment problems

The exact costs of equipment problems are hard to quantify, because of the complexity of the many variables.

What is the cost of the motor failure? Was it harmonics or some other cause?

In a manufacturing Plant, production line 5 is producing scrap, is it because of variations in the power supply that is affecting machine performance?

To get the correct answers, you need to do the following;

1. Troubleshoot to the root cause
2. Determine the actual costs.

Energy costs

How will one reduce power bill? You need to record consumption patterns and adjust the system and load timing to reduce one or more of the following;

1. Actual power (kWh) usage
2. Power factor penalties
3. A peak demand charge structure

To reduce power usage you have to eliminate inefficiencies in your distribution system.

Inefficiency sources include:

• High neutral currents due to unbalanced loads and triplen harmonics.
• Heavily loaded transformers, especially those serving non-linear loads.
• Old motors, old drives, and other motor-related issues.
• Highly distorted power, which may cause excessive heating in the power distribution system.

To reduce power factor penalties you have to correct power factor. Generally this involves installing correction capacitors.

But, the first approach is to correct distortion on the system.

Capacitors can present low impedance to harmonics and installing inappropriate PF correction can result in resonance or burned out capacitors.

To reduce peak demand charges, you have to manage peak loading. Unfortunately, many people overlook a major component of this cost – the effect of poor power quality on peak power usage-and thus underestimate their overpayments.

To determine the real costs of peak loading, you have to know three things:

1. “Normal” power usage
2. “clean power” power usage
3. Peak loading charge structure

By eliminating the power quality problems, you reduce the size of the peak demands and the base from which they start.

Until now, capturing the cost of energy waste caused by power quality issues was a task for the most experts engineers. The cost of waste could only be calculated by serious number crunching, a direct measurement of the waste and monetization was not possible.

With the deployment of a Power Quality analyzer, waste caused by common power quality issues such as harmonics and unbalance can be measured directly. By inputting the cost of energy into the instrument and the cost directly calculated.

FullSpectrum Energy, is the foremost Nigeria company in the field of power quality and energy management.

Well equipped with an eye of industry best practices, can work with you to reduce your facility downtime, mitigate equipment problems and save you money on energy costs

Thereby, keeping your business up & running seamlessly and profitably.

CONTACT US TODAY

Victor Oyedu, FNSE, FNIEEE, CPQ.
Power Quality and Energy Management Specialist.
Publisher at Afrienergyonline.com & 
CEO, FullSpectrum Energy Solutions Limited, Nigeria