International Power Quality and CT Lab's involvement

In times past, when electricity was considered one of the greatest inventions of its time, everybody started finding new and exciting ways to apply this technology to improve quality of life. Nobody asked any questions regarding the quality of the electrical supply - they were just happy to have it.

As the industry started growing, the availability and the quality of the electrical supply improved to a very high level, as we know it today. In some places in the world customers expect availability of electricity to be 99.999999 % ! This kind of request is very hard to meet and someone has to pay for it. Solutions to ensure that suppliers and users of electricity stay compatible with each other therefore need to be found.

International standards addressing the issue of compatibility started evolving and are reaching a mature level at present.

The European market is using the European norm - EN50160 and the new IEC standard IEC61000-4-30 as tools to balance the need for compatibility while the new IEEE 5960 standard is used in the USA. Most of the international standards are not addressed in isolation and are evolving to become one international power quality standard.

Some countries where the electricity supply market is not open to competition also have the same need for compatibility. They normally form national energy regulators that can act as a system watchdog with authority to settle any disputes between suppliers and users of electricity.

In South Africa the National Electricity Regulator (NER) developed regulations published as NRS048 to regulate the market. Parts of this document is currently under revision and a new document, SABS 1816, will soon be released. This new document will contain a proper instrument specification and test procedures to ensure that PQ monitoring instruments fully comply with the specification. The instrument specification is based on the IEC 6100-4-30 requirements, the existing NRS048 requirements and lessons learned from field experience. The main objective of this document is to separate the issues of instrument requirements and the setting of specific limits or tolerances, from each other. The political decision on setting limits and assessment methodologies will still be addressed in the NRS048 document while the SABS 1816 document will be used by industry as a technical reference and as a specification when purchasing PQ instruments as well as equipment that need to be connected to the electricity supply grid. Equipment manufacturers can also use SABS 1816 to ensure that their products are compatible with the electricity supply .

The monitoring of Power Quality has therefore become a very important aspect of the day-to-day activities of any modern electricity supplier and consumer. On the one side the supply must be continuously monitored to ensure compliance to minimum specifications and on the other side customers need to monitor their own contribution to PQ. Relationships between equipment failures and PQ need to be monitored to ensure proper specification of equipment connected to the grid.

CT Lab has been an active player in the South African PQ market since 1993. In April 2001 CT Lab will launch new generation PQ monitoring equipment on both the local and international market. The products are based on the latest international PQ specifications and requirements, but also include many practical enhancements required by practical users. Products are not limited to the supply of hardware alone, but also include fully remote operation software, databases to manage captured data and graphical presentation software to generate reports and graphs of both diagnostic and statistic data - all based on standards and regulations. CT Lab believes that the era of mass produced products are over - the era of mass customisation is here. Most of our software is therefore customisable and can be used in conjunction with the Internet. Development is done in Java and the communication protocol is TCP/IP.

CT Lab aims to supply total solutions and not just instrumentation!!