A Computation and Metering Method for Harmonic Emissions of Individual Consumers

As the ratio of nonlinear loads fed from grids are increasing day by day, harmonic pollution problems seem to be more and more serious. Problems related to harmonics are the main sources of economic losses at power systems. In order to reduce economic losses and provide cleaner grids, utilities need to find new and reasonable ways to control harmonic pollution. A proper way of this is to enforce monetary sanctions to the consumers who are responsible for harmonic pollution. With this way, consumers are encouraged to take necessary actions for reducing their harmonic emissions. However, utilities still need a fair, reasonable, and applicable method for this aim to control harmonic emissions of costumers. In this context, a new method to compute the contribution of individual customers to harmonic pollution of grids is presented in this paper. For this aim, an index representing the harmonic emission level of loads is defined. In the development of the method, responsibilities of utilities and consumers, harmonic limits specified by standards and effects of each harmonic component on grid elements have been especially taken into account. Thus, it has been possible to form a fair, reasonable, and applicable method. Validity of the method is tested by simulations, and results are discussed. At the end of this paper, an experimental setup designed for real-time metering is also presented. This demonstrated the applicability of such a metering device that uses the proposed method.