Power Quality & Advanced Technologies

Utility power systems continue to change, and some of these changes can impact the quality of power being delivered to utility customers. The CEATI Power Quality and Advanced Technologies (PQAT) program offers a forum for member utilities to stay on the leading edge of this change. This is done in four ways:

1. Customer Power Quality: The expectations of utility customers continue to rise such that it is becoming less acceptable for the utility representative to say, “I’ll get back to you on the reason for your upsetting event.” In PQAT we discuss and offer projects to improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosing these events. We also discuss ways to more productively address PQ problems andinteract with customers.

2. Power Quality Monitoring and Data Analysis: As a society we are now drowning in data. This includes the data from power quality monitors. In PQAT we are exploring ways to organize, automatically automate the analysis, and quickly report event data for upsetting PQ events.

3. Power Quality Impacts of DER Integration: Distributed Energy Resources (DER) are the single biggest change to traditional utility infrastructures. DERs can also have tremendous impact on the quality of electric service offered by utilities. In PQAT we focus on the PQ impacts of DER topics such as smart inverters, energy storage, safely maximizing system hosting limits, and interacting with customers on DER topics.

4. Transmission Power Quality: As solid-state switching devices (SVCs, STATCOMs, Filters) find their way into utility transmission systems power quality issues that once were only felt in the distribution system are presenting themselves at higher voltages. In PQAT we focus on these systems by discussing approaches to transmission PQ issues such as harmonics, resonance, PQ standardsas applied to transmission, and pitfalls of intermittent generation.

In addition to these areas of focus the PQAT group welcomes other issues that are sometimes assigned to PQAT members to address, but which are not wholly within the area of power quality.