THE CUSTOMER
The customer is a production unit of a large international group located in northern Italy, where steel beams are produced.
IL PROBLEMA
The plant is equipped with a fixed MV power factor correction switchgear, which fed reactive energy into the grid when production stopped in the F3 band. With the introduction of the new ARERA penalties, the company was faced with significant additional costs.
OUR SOLUTION
A first trivial solution could have been to bypass the fixed MV power factor correction system during plant downtime, but this is a delicate operation because of the possible overvoltages generated by capacitor disconnection. Another solution was to replace the fixed MV power factor correction equipment with an automatic one, but the purchase and installation costs of the latter are too high to justify the investment.
Among the companies asked for a solution to this problem was Ortea.
Once the customer’s request and needs were analyzed, Ortea’s team of engineers and designers identified an alternative solution to the two mentioned above.
This solution involved incorporating an ICAR by Ortea Next automatic LV power factor correction system into the company’s system with the voltage and current signals necessary for the proper calculation of the cosphi of the loads installed on the MV side taken right on the MV side.
This is possible thanks to the fact that the reactive energy fed into the LV system is propagated unaltered to the MV and thanks to the firmware of our regulator which, in addition to calculating how much reactive power to put into the LV in order to have the expected result in the MV, is able to protect itself from any problems that may occur in the LV.
This solution has brought numerous advantages to our customer:
- avoidance of the dangerous manoeuvre of excluding fixed equipment on MV
- a competitive and sustainable economic cost
- a technological solution with better performance for the same function
Ortea has a network of technicians at its headquarters and throughout the country ready to analyse any case relating to LV or MV system penalties.