European Power Quality Survey Report

By Jonathan Manson and Roman Targosz

Since the end of the 1990s the European Copper Institute [ECI] has been concerned about the impact experienced by commerce and industry of the changing nature of the energy demands organisations face as a result of equipment technological advances, the increasing need o build in resilience into their electrical power installations and the presumed mounting costs of not taking either adequate preventative or reactive action to accommodate the changes.

After some preliminary small scale studies into the impact of poor power quality on such organisations and as the empirical but anecdotal evidence mounted being discussed at length among the growing membership of the Leonardo Power Quality Initiative [LPQI*], so ECI decided to mount an extensive research project into what the impacts were on key energy suing industrial sectors of their not coping with poor power quality.

The project itself took over two years to complete and its results have been exposed in 2007 to a broad technical academic community with a view to securing their support and agreement for this work, the findings of which, whilst not surprising to us, make very negative reading in terms of the avoidable wastage and economic losses incurred by these industrial sectors at a time when energy and resource efficiency are the demands of today. Apply this to more commercial interpretation and it is clear that the EU’s competitive position is also unnecessarily undermined asa a result of this wastage.

This report presents the European PQ Survey – it is clear that the industrial sectors interviewed annually lose upwards of €150 billion as a direct result of their electrical power installations not being sufficiently reliable and resilient for today’s and future operating demands.

The causes of these losses are not new nor are the Power Quality [PQ] phenomena involved. What was both surprising as well as concerning was and we suspect is still the relative lack of analysis and measurement that take place among these power critical industries to be able to know what is causing these damaging interruptions to their operations.