A voltage-only method for assessing harmonic contribution from a customer installation

Abstract

This paper presents a simple planning-level method for assessing harmonic contribution from a customer installation to the total voltage distortion at the point of common coupling (PCC) in a considered network. The method consists of three steps, where voltage distortion level before connecting customer installation is first evaluated in terms of the contributions of the network and other connected customers to the PCC distortion and then, after customer installation is connected, in terms of customer contribution to the resulting PCC distortion. For evaluating these contributions, only the changes in harmonic voltages at the PCC are analysed and customer installation is also assessed for the ideally sinusoidal voltage source with no source impedance, where corresponding constant harmonic current sources are used to replace customer installation in the original network, providing additional criteria for disaggregating total PCC distortion into related parts. The presented approach is compared with two other commonly used methods and illustrated on a test network model.