Power Factor

Thread Starter

Asad1

Joined Feb 11, 2009
11
Practically speaking, is there any drawbacks of unity power factor? I have seen firms maintaining there power factor to strictly to 0.95, why is it so ??
 

jimkeith

Joined Oct 26, 2011
540
Unity power factor is the goal, but is impractical to achieve in most cases. 0.9 or better is very good. Tweaking it higher is not cost-effective as the power utility does provide further cost incentives--they penalize only the bad guys. Furthermore, it would require each and every load to be corrected or have expensive equipment to monitor and correct automatically.

Any firm claiming 0.95 or higher is in essence claiming how wonderful they are...and green...and lean...and low carbon footprint...and rich as all this stuff is expensive.
 

GetDeviceInfo

Joined Jun 7, 2009
2,192
Practically speaking, is there any drawbacks of unity power factor? I have seen firms maintaining there power factor to strictly to 0.95, why is it so ??
The only drawback to unity power is the cost in getting there. Those costs need to be compared to the expenses occurred in paying for the reactive power not being utilized. Power factors can be tightly controlled with modern bank switching units, if they are working correctly. If they are not monitored for proper operation, one could be double dipping in the negative side of cash flow.
 

JoeJester

Joined Apr 26, 2005
4,390
Any firm claiming 0.95 or higher is in essence claiming how wonderful they are...and green...and lean...and low carbon footprint...and rich as all this stuff is expensive.
Not all. My last unit was about 0.98 pf. It was carefully designed to be a balanced load to the utility. On one set of equipments we had power factor correcting capacitors and I know of a similar unit "helping" a utility company by removing some of those pf capacitors to even the load at the utility's generating plant.

It's not all about the carbon footprint. Carbon footprints were not in the vocabulary back then (80s and early 90s).
 
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