Article

P.Loganthurai, K.L.N College of Engineering ; L.Jayamala ,

Indian industry is paying one of the highest power tariffs in the world due to the poor quality and lack of power generation, transmission and distribution management. Recent advancements for higher power generation, lesser transmission and distribution cost and saving of energy can benefit significantly by improving the power system through energy efficiency at all levels. The electric billing is a two part tariff, the first part is unit (kWh) cost and the second part is maximum demand (kVA) cost. The maximum demand cost can be reduced by improving power factor. The overall power factor of modern industrial plants is low because of induction motors absorbing more reactive power. When power factor is improved, the reactive power necessary to supply the useful (real) power is automatically reduced. This results in the reduction of maximum demand (kVA) of the entire industrial plant. All the H.T (High Tension) consumers should maintain the power factor above 0.95 in order to avoid the penalization in their electricity bill. In many industries, they are maintaining good power factor (PF) at the incoming terminal of power lines using automatic power factor corrector but measuring power factor at the load side, it is low. Thus, in this proposed work the distributed power factor correction method is used to maintain good power factor at the load side. To select the suitable size of capacitor for compensating the reactive power requirement of induction motors, the Fuzzy Logic (FL) has been used.