Power Factor And You!

Power Factor Correction has been commonly used in North American industry for some time and recently has started to become popular in the residential sector as well. The real question is how can improving power factor benefit our environment?

To start, I guess we need a better understanding of what power factor is. Power factor is simply a measure of how efficiently we use our electricity. It is the difference in how much the utility is supplying us (or demand) versus how much we actually use to perform work (real power). Power factor is commonly displayed as a percentage or a decimal between 0 and 1. Ideally, a power factor of 1.0 or 100% would ensure that we waste no power. Realistically this cannot be achieved, but any increase is a positive one.

Poor power factor is created by inductive loads, which simply put create a current in the opposing direction. This opposing current renders portions of the energy being sent to you unusable for productive power. This unused energy must be dissipated somehow and results in the form of heat. The use of capacitors help to compensate for this inductance (or opposing current) making more of the energy usable.

So how does this affect our environment? Well, whether we're using this energy productively or not, the utilities are still required to send it to us. Improving power factor reduces the amount of wasted energy and therefore allows us to reduce the amount of energy we need to generate. If the generation of energy is cause for about 75% of green house gas emissions, reducing the total energy demand of a region by 15% would result in a reduction of emissions by about 10% overall.

If that's not an environmental impact, I don't know what is!

Keywords: