I work for a utility in the meter dept and im haveing a hard time with an instal we have a 120/208 padmount that serves a meterpack with form 12 meters which is a two element voltages are 120 degress apart the inverters that backfeed into this meter are single phase 180 degrees apart giving the meter a false power factor of .86 because of the inverter produces phase to phase voltage which lags our meter that measures phase to nuetral by 30 degrees giving us a false power factor meter still records correct for example 208 x 10 = 2080 inverter same production at meter 120x2x.866=2080. the numbers work but i dont like it because the inverters produce a power factor of 1 not .866 and we buy back .95 or better power factor. Has anyone else run into this?
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PV revenue meter
- Thread starter newt
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- Placerville, CA, USA
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- Retired PV System Designer
First of all, as you say, the inverter is producing at a power factor close to 1, and the meter is indirectly confirming that. The problem is in the interpretation of the results.
What is happening is that one line is seeing a *leading* PF of .86 while the other line is seeing a *lagging* PF of .86. Since VA is a complex quantity consisting of real power and reactive power, the sum of the two is real power with the two VAR components cancelling out
How you deal with this in your billing software is another question.
This is similar to the apparent low PF of a large 208V resistive load in an apartment with 120/208 taken from two phases of a three phase service. But in that case nobody cares about PF.
What is happening is that one line is seeing a *leading* PF of .86 while the other line is seeing a *lagging* PF of .86. Since VA is a complex quantity consisting of real power and reactive power, the sum of the two is real power with the two VAR components cancelling out
How you deal with this in your billing software is another question.
This is similar to the apparent low PF of a large 208V resistive load in an apartment with 120/208 taken from two phases of a three phase service. But in that case nobody cares about PF.
First of all, as you say, the inverter is producing at a power factor close to 1, and the meter is indirectly confirming that. The problem is in the interpretation of the results.
What is happening is that one line is seeing a *leading* PF of .86 while the other line is seeing a *lagging* PF of .86. Since VA is a complex quantity consisting of real power and reactive power, the sum of the two is real power with the two VAR components cancelling out
How you deal with this in your billing software is another question.
This is similar to the apparent low PF of a large 208V resistive load in an apartment with 120/208 taken from two phases of a three phase service. But in that case nobody cares about PF.
Right now we manual read but we will be getting new meters that will be read remotely i wanted to put a form 2 meter in but engineer did not agree
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