The issue of poor power quality, is one that largely goes unnoticed. Often, the consequences of poor power quality can be blamed on hardware and software issues, and relationships between clients and suppliers can sour over disagreements about who is at fault (and most likely who’s picking up the bill).
The whole time, there could be a frequent power quality event occurring that causes hardware or software to malfunction, and any efforts to remedy the problem without consideration for the electrical supply will be wasted the next time the same type of event happens again.
This can all be very costly:
- Loss of supply due to frequent tripping of breakers.
- Wasted products and materials, due to malfunctioning process control components (eg. misfiring sensors).
- Production downtime to carry out repeat repairs or restarts.
- Replacement parts and components with continued repeat failure.
- Critical experiments ruined due to anomalies and damaged equipment.
- Soured relationships between key suppliers and customers that result from the above.
These are to name just a few of the potential problems associated with no consideration for power quality. We have seen many more, but in most cases, the cost of mitigation is very small compared to the overall cost of the problem.