- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Engineer
Not necessarily. There are different forms of utility tariffs depending on what type of customer / consumer you are. If you are a residential consumer, they don't bother with separate PF charges because a) it only counts in the aggregate effects, so the cost of metering all the residential users would not be worth the effort, and b) as Zog says, they are burying the cost in the bill in other ways. If you are an industrial or large commercial user however (usually defined as a 3 phase service) then you do most likely get a kVAR meter and thus a separate charge for having poor power factor.And this is kind of what I am not liking.
People that have good power factors are paying for those that don't. Thus, there is only a motivation to reduce watts, even at the expense of power factor.
Hmmm... If you are motivated to reduce VA, you are motivated to reduce Watts, it's virtually impossible to increase only your reactive power consumption, i.e. "wasting power factor".If we were charged for VA's, we would be motivated to reduce those, which would be a much more fair system, and more effective at attaining the goal of total energy efficiency.
But....that may be bad for CFL sales....
D'oh, serves me right for going to lunch and posting when I got back, not noticing the new responses. Never mind, everything I just said here has been covered.
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