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Every manufacturing facility has different stages between raw material and finished commercial product. These different stages have individual motor circuit control (MCC) units, supplied from the ACB in primary control panel

Distribution transformer is a part of every electrical power network at user end. If a facility is being supplied on HT from the utility, transformer and its losses comes under user’s responsibility. Like any other equipment its efficiency is calculated as the ratio of output power and input power. As transformer operates on the magnetizing phenomenon and it has no rotating parts, its efficiency is very high. It usually stays above 95% but as the power flow across a transformer is very high even small changes in terms of efficiency percentage gives significant energy savings.

K-factor for an electrical network primarily relates to non-linear loads and is defined as a number representing the effect of harmonics on the heating of transformer. For calculating the K-factor all the harmonics up to a predefined limit are considered.

Indian government has announced an ambitious plan of setting up hundreds of smart cities across the country. However, no city can be called a smart city unless government can provide uninterrupted power. One of the major reasons behind long power cuts and huge losses for electricity distribution companies is electricity theft. India is one of the worst affected countries and controlling theft is imperative to provide uninterrupted power to the entire country.

A critical and important part of a smart city is to have an efficient electrical infrastructure, often termed as a smart grid.

I recently met an old friend who is currently managing operations at one of the hospitals of a large healthcare company. One of his KPIs is to reduce his energy bill on a month-on-month basis. He told me that he knows how to do this, but he does not know how to keep a track without spending too much time.

The smart meters are providing energy data that is being used not only to monitor and analyse the energy consumption, but also to draw insights about other business areas. For example, an MD of a large manufacturing unit in India is using high resolution energy data (provided by Zenatix Solutions) to monitor the production schedules at his plant.

The cost of electricity has been increasing rapidly – both because of increased prices and increased demand. Since electricity spend is one of the major operating costs for both commercial and industrial consumers, reducing and keeping a tight control on electricity costs is increasingly becoming a key performance indicator.

Any deviation in voltage and current waveform from perfect sinusoidal, in terms of magnitude or phase shift is termed as unbalance. In ideal conditions i.e. with only linear loads connected to the system, the phases of power supply are 120 degree apart in terms of phase angle and magnitude of their peaks should be same. On distribution level, the load imperfections cause current unbalance which travel to transformer and cause unbalance in the three phase voltage. Even minor unbalance in the voltage at transformer level disturbs the current waveform significantly on all the loads connected to it. Not only in the distribution side but through the transformer, voltage unbalances disturbs the high voltage power system as well.