Energy Management

Energy Management

Modern electrical equipment imposes stringent demands on voltage stability and power quality. The power network can tolerate only a limited level of harmonics and other electrical disturbances. By installing passive harmonic filters in medium voltage networks, several benefits are achieved:

  • High power factor to reduce penalization by utilities due to reactive power consumption
  • Improved voltage stability, transmission capacity and lower network losses
  • Prevented resonance problems and amplification of disturbances

ElectroDrives provides four different types of medium voltage equipment:

  1. Fixed medium voltage capacitor banks. This is the most basic solution aimed to compensate reactive power of the plant. Typically, it is aimed for those plants where the load does not change very significantly, meaning the reactive power compensated is constant.
  2. Multi-stage automatic MV capacitor banks. For more complex plants, where the load changes significantly, it is best to gain flexibility by having several stages of capacitor banks that are controlled automatically based on customizable algorithms (i.e. set point of power factor, set point of reactive power, set point of harmonics, set point of THD, a combination of ranges of different variables, or more complex algorithms)
  3. Static VAR Compensation (SVC). When load variations are very fast or a precise power factor is required, it is best to have power electronics switching elements to introduce inductive or capacitive compensating loads exactly as required.
  4. Hybrid SVC and capacitor banks. Combines both SVC and multi-stage capacitor banks to optimize the size of each element.

The above equipment can be combined with reactors and damping resistors tuned at particular frequencies to add an harmonics filtering feature to the reactive power compensation functionality, becoming a Medium Voltage Harmonics Filter. ElectroDrives includes in his services the evaluation of the plant needs including harmonics analysis, flicker evaluation and other disturbances together with a detailed analysis of reactive power loads at different operating points of the plant to reach the best solution. This includes the fulfillment of power quality requirements of IEEE 519 or national grid code regulations