Probabilistic evaluation of the economical damage due to harmonic losses in industrial energy system

The problem of the harmonic loss evaluation is of growing interest among power system engineers, both for the increase of operating costs and the decrease of the useful life of the system components. The paper addresses this problem with a probabilistic approach to take into account the randomness of current and voltage harmonics; a method for evaluating the expected value of the operating costs and of the premature aging costs is presented. A numerical application to a test system is also discussed, showing the viability of the proposed approach and the significance of the results; in particular, the aging costs turn out to be unaffected by the type of probability density function describing the harmonics.