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Back in , a manufacturing company lost more than $3 million in one day in Silicon Valley when the lights went out and its manufacturing plant sat idle without electricity.1 Worldwide customer surveys show that power quality related disturbances are increasing every year. Today, nearly 20% of the world’s electricity is wasted due to inefficiencies in power transmission and distribution, resulting in devastating business downtime and financial impact and adding the equivalent of millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. As our reliance on electricity continues to grow, improving the efficiency of how we generate, transmit, and use energy is more crucial than ever.
In this blog, we’ll explore the essential role of grid components in powering our world, the challenges posed by poor power quality, and how advancements in technology are helping to make the journey of electricity more sustainable and efficient for everyone.
While we all expect electricity to be a constant and uninterrupted force, the reality is that modern power grids are increasingly strained by a variety of new loads. Devices like LED lamps, computers, medical equipment, and electric vehicle chargers contribute to what is known as power pollution. These devices can introduce harmful effects into the network, leading to poor power quality, which in turn impacts equipment reliability, performance, and even human health.
Now that you understand power pollution – the disruptions and inconsistencies in electricity that plague energy networks – let’s explore how it wreaks havoc across critical industries.
From a financial perspective, poor power quality can mean a drain on the bottom line, thanks to damaged equipment, lost productivity, and product spoilage. In addition, poor power quality increases energy consumption by causing inefficiencies that waste power, drive up costs, and boost carbon emissions. With much of our electricity still sourced from fossil fuels, every inefficiency in the system adds to our environmental footprint.
To help you grasp the full extent of the impact of poor power quality, let’s break down the consequences it brings to these key industries:
Hospitals: Where power quality equals life quality
In hospitals, power quality can literally be a matter of life and death. Critical medical equipment – like ventilators, infusion pumps, and heart monitors – requires a steady, uninterrupted power supply to function properly. Harmonics can cause them to malfunction, leading to potentially dangerous outcomes.
The fix: One effective way to combat harmonics is by using active harmonic filters. This technology provides greater flexibility and scalability, allowing for more efficient power factor correction, harmonics filtering, and voltage balancing. Hitachi Energy’s active filters equipped a hospital in Brazil to operate with improved power quality to ensure seamless operation of critical equipment such as tomography and resonance machines.
Schools: Power interruptions that disrupt learning
In today’s classrooms, technology is at the core education. From interactive smartboards and projectors to online resources, schools rely heavily on stable electricity to ensure lessons run smoothly. Risks of poor power quality go beyond flickers and interruptions. In an era where education is increasingly dependent on technology, unstable power can undermine learning and hinder students’ ability to succeed.
The fix: Since schools deal with high levels of harmonics from multiple electronic devices, active harmonic filters prove to be the most effective solution by correcting distortions in real time, ensuring reliable power and less equipment downtime. The PQactiF active harmonic filter is Hitachi Energy’s newest modular, flexible, and high-efficiency solution for modern power networks. This technology played a key role in improving the power network quality at a leading school in Vietnam, enhancing the overall learning environment.
Food manufacturing: Poor power is a recipe for disaster
When it comes to the food manufacturing industry, precision is more than a goal – it’s an important necessity. Poor power quality can throw off automated processes, impacting everything from temperature control to production timing. Even a small voltage dip can cause freezers to malfunction, jeopardizing the quality of ingredients and risking costly food spoilage. Unreliable power can result in wasteful resources and possibly damage a company’s reputation.
The fix: To safeguard against the costly impacts of poor power quality, food manufacturers can implement active harmonic filters and power conditioning systems. When paired together, it provides a robust defense against downtime, maintaining high standards of food quality. Hitachi Energy’s PQactiF helped to cancel harmonics at a leading food processing company in Belgium and is an ideal solution for networks powered by renewable energy.
Imagine walking outside on a nice quiet afternoon, when suddenly, a thunderclap hits – bright, loud, and completely unexpected. Your heart races for a while and the feeling freezes you for a moment. Now, picture that same surge of energy racing through your power lines. Without protection, it could do extreme damage to equipment and cause major disruptions. And that’s where surge arresters come in and save the day.
Just like your body instinctively reacts to thunder, surge arresters quickly divert excess voltage, safeguarding the energy system from the shock. Surge arresters are designed to protect critical and expensive equipment from power surges. This not only reduces the need for costly repairs but also contributes to the long-term sustainability of the grid by ensuring that critical components are protected.
One of the most innovative solutions in the power grid today is the Spark Prevention Unit (SPU), which aims to reduce the risk of wildfires caused by electrical systems. Surge arresters, especially those used in fire-prone areas, can sometimes become overloaded and create sparks. These sparks can ignite vegetation, leading to devastating wildfires. The SPU addresses this issue by monitoring the thermal loading of surge arresters and disconnecting them from the network if they are at risk of failure. This preventive measure has already helped avoid numerous wildfires in regions such as the USA and Australia, where wildfires are a common and deadly occurrence.
Electricity is what keeps our world running smoothly, and innovations like active harmonic filters and surge arresters are the unsung heroes that make it all possible. These incredible solutions protect power networks from voltage spikes and tackle distortions caused by excessive loads, ensuring everything from high-tech equipment to everyday appliances operate seamlessly.
As technology advances, so too must our power grids. The grid is evolving, and new challenges and opportunities are emerging. At Hitachi Energy, we are committed to developing solutions that not only improve the efficiency of the grid but also help reduce its environmental impact. From harmonics filtering to surge protection and wildfire prevention, our goal is to create a more sustainable, efficient, and reliable energy future.
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No matter the facility, unplanned downtime can be extremely costly. In this post we’ll look at some of the impacts of downtime, the parts that power availability and reliability play in this equation, and the five ways that digital products, software, and services working together can help.
The real cost of downtime depends largely on the type of organization. For example, a Ponemon study reported that the average cost of a data center outage is over $740k. In healthcare, the average estimated downtime cost per minute is $8,662, an outage lasting 8 hours could cost $4.1M and this doesn’t even include the critical risks to human life. U.S. commercial and industrial businesses reported that 40% had experienced a power outage costing more than $50,000 during the last year, with 2% reporting losses over $2 million.
So what’s the cause of these outages? Some are the result of major power grid outages. In fact, extreme weather events have been increasing in recent years, with sixteen weather disasters with losses in the billions of dollars experienced in the U.S. in . Another major contributor is a facility’s own internal power infrastructure. Electrical networks are becoming more complex, with decentralized power sources and more power electronic devices causing more power quality ‘pollution’. These conditions can impact the reliability of increasing amounts of digitized, power-sensitive equipment. If power distribution is not designed, protected, monitored, and maintained properly, there can be hidden risks to the power availability you depend on.
Let us clarify a couple of definitions that are often confused. Understanding these terms can help us better understand best steps forward.
The power availability and reliability of a distribution system encompasses its entire lifecycle, from design to operations. Consider these five approaches:
A pre-engineered medium and/or low voltage electrical distribution system will be based on a reference design that has been validated for the specific application.
A design should include the core power system design, as well as the connected, digital layer of intelligence used for power management. To further enhance resilience the design can include backup power and power conditioning (e.g. generators, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), automatic transfer switches (ATS), harmonic filtering). It should also comply with local regulations and international standards, and be optimized for safety to help avoid injury to people and damage to equipment.
A pre-engineered reference design will also significantly streamline the design-build process, reducing both the overall risk and cost of implementing and operating the system. Specialized electrical distribution design software optimizes every aspect of the system for its specified application, taking into account all expected operational and environmental conditions, today and tomorrow. This will help future-proof the facility.
The newest circuit breaker technology protects people and equipment, while at the same time maintaining the operations of a facility. If a fault occurs at any point in an electrical distribution circuit, you don’t want that fault to affect the power availability for the entire facility. Selective coordination is used by circuit breakers to rapidly isolate the problem section, tripping only the circuit breaker directly upstream of the problem section, without depriving the rest of the network of power.
Electrical distribution design enables you to optimize your installation design, selecting sizes and combinations of circuit breakers to provide ‘total’ selective coordination between all stages of the electrical distribution network.
The best circuit breakers are easy to maintain, withdrawable and plug-in features makes them easier to manage. Smart circuit breakers also offer embedded metering capabilities to support connected power management and predictive maintenance.
Throughout your power distribution system, there can be risks to reliability that are hidden and go unnoticed. A fully digitized electrical system can better withstand power disturbances and is resilient to downtime. A power management system takes advantage of data from connected devices, acting like a microscope on your electrical system, continuously monitoring its performance and the assets connected to it. If any unexpected condition is detected, an alarm notifies personnel wherever they are so that they can immediately locate the issue and take action to prevent a critical situation.
A connected power network includes intelligent, connected advanced power meters that quickly reveal power quality issues – such as high harmonics or voltage sags – or other types of faults, while diagnostic tools help facility team determine root causes before they can cause an outage.
A digitally-connected power management solution should also include wireless thermal sensors, for early detection of abnormal temperature rises on conductors and connection points. This will help reduce the risk of a fire or failure (and associated downtime), while avoiding the time and cost of annual infrared (IR) testing. Another recent innovation is the ability to monitor circuit breaker health and aging, with advanced analytics that enable more proactive maintenance, preventing performance issues, and extending breaker life. These capabilities help ensure that a clean, stable power is always available 24/7, while reducing operational costs.
Cloud-based power management applications act as a portal to remote expert services. If your organization has limited onsite technical resources or expertise, these ‘digital services’ can help you reduce the complexity and time needed to manage your power distribution systems, while improving power quality, reliability, and availability.
Expert advisors will monitor your operation 24/7, delivering condition-based insights about your electrical system health and asset performance. These insights enable a more predictive maintenance approach, resulting in fewer operational failures and a downtime reduction of 30 to 50%. Advisory services, including Schneider Electric EcoXpert partners, can also help you evolve your system over its life cycle.
Despite taking all these steps to prevent downtime, there is always the chance of unplanned downtime. If a fault occurs, you need to minimize its duration and impact. Having the right products and software will help ensure a rapid recovery. Some of the newest tools will the on-site facility team automatically correlate system-wide data and reveal the propagation of a disturbance to isolate the source. In addition, smart protection relays, trip units, and accessories (e.g. auxiliary contacts, etc.) will help more quickly localize a fault, identifying the tripped circuit-breaker and its associated circuit. A smartphone app can then be used find the root cause of the incident, and have access to step-by-step guidance to help quickly restore power.
In the more complex, more power-sensitive ‘New Electric World’, businesses face the risk of more unplanned downtime, highly inefficient electrical operations, and more frequent equipment failures. These can all lead to higher OPEX spending and, in some cases, major financial losses. For these reasons, more focus must now be placed on using the right technologies and services to help ensure innovative power solutions.
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