Survey on assessment of power quality cost in Shanghai China

Power quality (PQ) issues cause a lot economic loss. It is very helpful for the governmental decisions of the PQ policies and supervisions to know the PQ loss from macroscopical aspects. This paper presents the procedure and some interesting findings of the survey of PQ cost of the customers in Shanghai during 2010-2011. The survey was carried out in two steps with 147 valid questionnaire samples among 18 sectors and 40 face to face interviews among 7 sectors. Based on the statistics of the answer of the respondents, there is a lot of information about PQ issues in Shanghai, such as the most frequent PQ events, the most PQ sensitive devices, the causes of PQ events, the effectiveness of the mitigation devices and so on. Finally, the total PQ loss of respondents were counted. By the linear fitting analysis, the PQ cost and annual PQ loss in Shanghai can be estimated. The PQ cost estimation is with high reference value for the government who is in charge of the policies of PQ issues and the customers who select the technical and economic strategies for PQ problems.