A Little Guide to Power Factor Correction
In the renewables game solar is the king of the medias. Solar is great, but it doesn’t always produce the expected result because of deficient installations, lack of sun or sometimes just because the electricity production and consumption times just don’t match. If we look beyond solar there are many other ways for businesses to save energy with more certain results and Power Factor Correction is one of them.
What is Power Factor?
As its name indicates, Power Factor is a ratio, which measures how efficiently an electrical unit consumes the energy it draws from the energy supply in an AC power system.
Imagine you are ordering a dish at the restaurant and you are quite hungry so you’ll order a big steak with fries. You are 95% done with your plate when you decide you’re full and had enough. This means there is a 5% of food leftover. If you are the electricity consumer and the plate is the energy supplier, youre power factor is 0.95. So, there is 5% which is just wasted.
How do you Correct Power Factor?
Back to electricity, we say that a perfect Power Factor is 1 because it means that you use all the electricity you import. If it is lower than one, you will have to pay all the electricity you are drawing from the network but are not using (aka Reactive Power). Usually, your bills will charge a penalty for the Apparent Power (look for kVA).
One way to reach a Power Factor of 1 is to change all your inefficient machines and buy new
efficient ones. A more realistic option is to tackle the problem at the source: at your meter. We can install a meter which will adapt how much electricity you ask from the grid.
To go back to our restaurant metaphor, Power Factor correction is about serving the right portion to the customer. We want to make sure to bring to the table a plate which will exactly meet the client’s quantitative needs.
And you don’t have to worry about not getting enough electricity. Power Factor equipment cannot underfeed the machine, so business can continue as usual.
Manage My Power started as an energy management software, but when we noticed the power and result of PFC we immediately jumped on board. So far we have noticed that a majority of our customer’s sites can make a Return on Investment guaranteed in bout 3 years. In some cases, it can be made in 2 years.
To guarantee the results we’ll even through in one of our famous monitoring kit so you can verify by yourself the accuracy of the results.