Decarbonization of Distribution Transformers Based on Current Reduction: Economic and Environmental Impacts

Well-known industrial practice efficiency improvement techniques, such as reactive compensation, load balancing, and harmonic filtering, are used in this paper to reduce energy losses in distribution transformers, and therefore, to decrease carbon dioxide emissions and economic costs in the operation of these transformers. Load balancing is carried out by monitoring the values of the angles of the active and reactive components of the vector unbalanced power. Likewise, the application of Order 3/2020 of the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission is described, in detail, for the calculation of the economic costs derived from the transformer energy losses caused by the load currents and the penalties due to transformer energy deliveries with capacitive power factors. Finally, all these improvement techniques are applied to determine savings in carbon dioxide emissions and costs on the electricity bill of an actual 1000 kVA distribution transformer that supplies a commercial and night-entertainment area. The results of this application case reveal that cost reductions due to energy loss savings are modest, but the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and the savings in penalties for capacitive reactive supplies are significant.

Selecting two-photon sequential ionization pathways in H2 through harmonic filtering

Recent experiments in gas-phase molecules have shown the versatility of using attosecond pulse trains combined with IR femtosecond pulses to track and control excitation and ionization yields on the attosecond...

The Performance of the BTB-VSC for Active Power Balancing, Reactive Power Compensation and Current Harmonic Filtering in the Interconnected Systems

Nowadays, the use of power converters to control active and reactive power in AC–AC grid-connected systems has increased. With respect to indirect AC–AC converters, the tendency is to enable the back-to-back (BTB) voltage source converter (VSC) as an active power filter (APF) to compensate current harmonics. Most of the reported works use the BTB-VSC as an auxiliary topology that, combined with other topologies, is capable of active power regulation, reactive power compensation and current harmonic filtering. With the analysis presented in this work, the framework of the dynamics associated with the control loops is established and it is demonstrated that BTB-VSC can perform the three tasks for which, in the reviewed literature, at least two different topologies are reported. The proposed analysis works to support the performance criteria of the BTB-VSC when it executes the three control actions simultaneously and the total current harmonic distortion is reduced from 27.21% to 6.16% with the selected control strategy.

Coordinated Operation of Energy Storage Systems for Distributed Harmonic Compensation in Microgrids

Energy storage systems (ESSs) bring various opportunities for a more reliable and flexible operation of microgrids (MGs). Among them, energy arbitrage and ancillary services are the most investigated application of ESSs. Furthermore, it has been shown that some other services could also be provided by ESSs such as power quality (PQ) improvements. This issue could be more challenging in MGs with widespread nonlinear loads injecting harmonic currents to the MG. In this paper, the feasibility of ESSs to act as coordinated active harmonic filters (AHF) for distributed compensation was investigated. An optimization model was proposed for the coordination of the harmonic compensation activities of ESSs. The model takes into account the various technical and systematic constraints to economically determine the required reference currents of various AHFs. Simulation cases showed the performance of the proposed model for enhancing the harmonic filtering capability of the MG, reduction in the compensation cost, and more flexibility of the distributed harmonic compensation schemes. It was also shown that ESS activities in harmonic compensation do not have much of an effect on the ESSs revenue from energy arbitrage. Hence, it could make ESSs more justifiable for use in MGs.