CIGRE/CIRED JWG C4.42: Overview of common methods for assessment of harmonic contribution from customer installation

Control and limitation of harmonic current emission from new customer installations is essential for maintaining supply voltage distortions below the prescribed compatibility or planning levels, and is also required for ensuring electromagnetic compatibility. At the planning stage, emissions of low-order harmonic current are evaluated based on several assumptions and simplifications related to, e.g. use of summation exponent and presence of background distortion. Consequently, the actual contribution of a new customer installation to the resulting supply voltage distortion after its connection can significantly differ from the estimation at the planning stage, what typically results in a less-efficient utilization of the available grid hosting capacity. A new CIGRE/CIRED Joint Working Group C4.42 is established to identify or develop suitable measurement-based methods for reliable and accurate assessment of the harmonic contributions from new customer installations to the resulting supply voltage distortion. One of the initial tasks of JWG C4.42 is comparison of existing methods, which is presented in this paper.