Power Quality Improvement $$$

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skip.delclos

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Gentlemen, tough question (I think),

Is there a way to estimate a dollar value associated with PQ improvement that is realistic. I realize every facility will have it's own PQ issues but is it possible to assign a rough conservative estimate. We are evaluating a power conditioning system that has a small kW savings component (2%) but seems to have significant power quality enhancement qualities (PF near unity, increased voltage, spike/surge protection, reduced harmonics to loads, reduced amperage on system). We don't want to ignore these benefits but we are in the dark on how to place a monetary value on them. Thanks for any suggestions.

Skip Delclos
 
Sorry, no rules of thumb.

First, look at the bill for direct bill savings on kW & kWh reduction and any low pf penalty reduction.

As for the other, you have to determine what outages, equipment failures, administrative headaches, etc are avoided to determine the value. If the existing harmonics were not causing significant issues, the reduction in harmonics brings you zero value, etc.

Where you already going to invest in some type of surge/spike protection or is it just a good side-effect? Was the risk you had worth an investment? How much of that risk is being addressed with the proposed equipment?

Are you really able to make use of any capacity that is freed up on the power distribution system? If not, it has no value after the fact because the benefit is best when pf correction is included at the design stage.

The sales person will generally make assumptions that favor your buying their product. If it is a significant investment, perhaps an evaluation by a non-partisan 3rd party would be prudent.
 
Start with: how much does downtime cost? I've used this argument many times with software companies. When you have 50 engineers twiddling their thumbs because the servers are down from a power hit (or don't restart nicely), that rapidly adds up to the cost of a big UPS. Or, what's the restart cost of machines? If it takes four hours to restart a molding machine after a hit, what's the valus of lost production? How about possible damage to the machine by an unplanned shutdown?

I heard of a glass manufacturing plant that installed co-gen equipment since the cost of the co-gen was less than the plant restart cost and the PoCo was not reliable enough.
 
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