Impact Assessment of Power Quality Limits in Colombia: a Regulatory Approach

Abstract

In order to improve present regulations about Power quality (PQ) in Colombia, an impact assessment of PQ limits among utility companies and customers is presented in this paper. This evaluation takes into account results obtained from a previous project of PQ measurements in Bogota-Colombia (PQB) over a representative sample of end users. This paper evaluates the percentage of users that would be surpassing some proposed limits for PQ disturbances such as: THD, TDD, Individual harmonics, Unbalance voltage, Flicker and Unbalance current. This analysis was carried out for industrial and commercial facilities taking into account that these users require higher levels of power quality and therefore may inquire in bigger costs in case of poor power quality conditions compared to other type of users such as residential customers. The results achieved in this work show that for some disturbances is possible to apply a regulation based on international standards as IEC and IEEE but in other parameters their application could become very expensive for utilities and end users.