Warning: Private methods cannot be final as they are never overridden by other classes in /home/public/wp-content/plugins/sf-move-login/inc/classes/class-sfml-singleton.php on line 64

Warning: Private methods cannot be final as they are never overridden by other classes in /home/public/wp-content/plugins/sf-move-login/inc/classes/class-sfml-singleton.php on line 72

Warning: The magic method SFML_Singleton::__wakeup() must have public visibility in /home/public/wp-content/plugins/sf-move-login/inc/classes/class-sfml-singleton.php on line 72

Deprecated: Required parameter $current_comment follows optional parameter $custom_options in /home/public/wp-content/themes/suffusion/functions/filters.php on line 48

Deprecated: Required parameter $current_post follows optional parameter $custom_options in /home/public/wp-content/themes/suffusion/functions/filters.php on line 48
Power Factor Corrrections – Effective Concepts LLC
Deprecated: Required parameter $args follows optional parameter $depth in /home/public/wp-content/themes/suffusion/library/suffusion-walkers.php on line 27

Deprecated: Required parameter $output follows optional parameter $depth in /home/public/wp-content/themes/suffusion/library/suffusion-walkers.php on line 27
Jul 132015
 

Every full Energy Audit should look at Power Factor. It’s funny how often it comes up. Even when you don’t think you have a problem you might in the future.
I first heard about Power Factor Corrections in the late 1980s. My friend’s dad worked for Border States Electric (BSE) as an engineer. He came over to the BSE from Northern States Power (Now Xcel Energy). He was one of the first guys in the area to work on solving this problem using banks of capacitors. He would tell me how electric motors would create a lagging power factor. His job was to calculate the capacitance necessary to correct for low power factors. It didn’t hurt that BSE got a lot of orders for switched capacitor banks.

In the 1990s, my dad and I started to do some energy audits of our own. We would run deal with facilities looking to increase the efficiency of their equipment. It was there they would run afoul of low power factors. Utilities don’t like low power factors and will bill a penalty if your power factor falls below a certain threshold. Our lighting retrofits would have very clean power and high power factors, but because we were using substantially less energy for lighting than before- there was less clean electricity to dilute the dirty (low power factor) electricity, which the motors were using, and hence the facilities would be getting billed a Power Factor penalty. The solution: capacitors and/or new energy efficient motors- but that’s a story for another day.

If you’d like to learn more about Power Factor corrections and motors, I have this article from Moorhead Public Service and their partners at Missouri River Energy Services.

 Posted by at 9:41 am

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Notice: ob_end_flush(): Failed to send buffer of zlib output compression (0) in /home/public/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5279