POWER QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF EMERGENCY GENERATOR UNITS

The Distributed System Operators' (DSO) outage duration can be significantly reduced with the use of emergency generators or mobile power plant, as they constitute efficient solutions to temporarily restore power to customers while lengthy reparation works are being carried out. Portuguese Power Quality regulation establishes that, under normal operating conditions, the characteristics of the supply voltage must comply with the EN 50160 standard, which describes the limits or values within which the voltage characteristics (frequency, voltage variations and unbalance, flicker severity and harmonic distortion) are expected to remain at any supply terminal in public European electricity networks. Even though emergency generators and mobile power plant typically are not used under normal operating conditions, Power Quality regulation must be met in order to provide optimal quality of service to the customer. Regardless the source of power, DSOs must always comply with existing regulation and legislation. This work presents an analysis of different kind of emergency generators and mobile power plants operated by E-REDES and assesses also the compliance of the power quality with the NP EN 50160 standard