Assessment of power quality cost for high-tech industry

Power quality (PQ) is an important issue for modern manufacturing and process control industries. Energy efficient and electronically controlled automatic machines are sensitive to the deviations in the supply voltage. The quality of power supply has caused a direct economic impact on many industrial customers. At facilities where high degree of power quality and reliability is critical, any voltage surge, sag and momentary outage on the supply lasting more than a few cycles could cause several tools and production lines to malfunction. This paper presents two survey results of interruption cost and power quality requirement for the high-tech industry to identify the type of disturbances that generate productivity losses and to estimate the relevant damage. PQ costs for six categories of the high-tech industry are presented. The PQ costs of the whole high-tech park and a semiconductor company under different disturbance conditions are evaluated. Test results have indicated that the PQ costs of the high-tech industry are great and sensitive to the duration of the disturbance event. With the study results in hands, the level of PQ cost for the high-tech industry can be identified and the utility can determine the appropriate mitigations to reduce the cost loss for power quality issues.