Utility companies charge for apparent power?

My understanding is that residental customers only pay for real power wheras commercial customers -- who have a much more complicated rate structure in the first place -- also pay for real power but are required to keep their power factor within certain bounds or end up paying various surcharges. Hence the large capacitor banks you see outside of mills and other heavy motor users, with their capacitance offsetting the inductance of all the motors.

Commercial customers often pay more (per kWh) for a poor power factor. I have never seen this adjusted rate applied to individual consumers.

In my experience (East coast of the U.S.) no one is charged directly for apparent power. Households pay for only actual energy (kilowatt hours) because that is all their meter responds to. Industrial customers often pay a power factor adder and it is metered separately from real power. Contracts are often individually negotiated.

Apparently so.

It depends on what kind of customer you are. Residential customers usually don't pay for the reactive power component. Commercial and industrial customers usually do.

Its actually not a bad idea. A significant part of the power companies capital cost is invested in delivering apparent power to its customers. Why not charge them for it?

Everyone pays to some extent. It's built into the operating cost and profit margins of the local utility.

Commercial customers often have a different rate for service. This rate can include power factor, as well as demand loading. (Power is often more expensive to deliver during peak hours, for example.)

In response, power-hungry entities such as high power UHF TV stations often use something like this: (very cool to see in action!)

-mpm

That doesn't do anything about peak power rates. It may be helpful if the utilities voltage regulation doesn't meet the load requirements, but the instantaneous power consumption will remain the same.

On Feb 14, 12:57=EF=BF=BDam, "Paul Hovnanian P.E." wrot= e:

Agreed. Typically, (almost without exception, actually), they are 3- ph high-voltage supplies, and they are often unbalanced. I did not mean to imply variable transformers could affect demand meter readings..... (Could have worded that better in retrospect.) -mpm

Oh they do charge us for it! I have a residential account with National Grid. Our per kWh charge is 8 cents, but then they add in all the distribution charges and our per kWh rises to 14 cents a kWh.

Deregulation did nothing but make the companies richer. It never saved the consumer any money.

That's why I want to see the regulatory clamps applied to power and telecom companies again.

You probably live in a blue state. Here in Arizona I just looked at this month's bill... 5441 kWh @ 6.78¢/kWh INCLUDING everything: service charge, delivery/distribution charges, fuel adjustments, taxes, everything ;-)

...Jim Thompson

What point are you trying to make here? I thought that Arizona backed away from its deregulation experiment after seeing what happened in California and Texas, and that the a large component of Arizona electrical power is from federal government hydro projects on the Colorado River.

Lots of the infrastructure in many developed economies worldwide for power and to a lesser extent telecoms is coming to the end of its usable life - varying between around 15 and 60 years depending on the specific equipment types. Overhead lines, cables and transformers are at the upper end of this asset life, switchgear somewhere above the middle and control and protection equipment towards the lower end.

Deregulation usually sets a ceiling on the rate of return the network operator can make from their very significant capital investment - usually pegged for a multi year term at a level relative to a general economy inflation figure. This rate of return *might* be above the general inflation rate where it is recognised that very significant under investment has taken place in the past but in many cases it can be below the inflation figure in an effort to squeeze the network operator for operational efficiencies in delivering capital projects. A below inflation basis is very common in the UK where electricity, gas, water and telecoms have been deregulated for between 18 years in the case of electricity and 27 years in the case of telecoms.

So there is a choice (but it's now out of your hands) you either pay the going rate where assets are replaced on a sustainable and controlled basis or have it much cheaper now and have a failing and increasingly unreliable service in the future.

Most of the cost increases you are seeing are nothing to do with the network operator making more money but more to do with the cost of generation rising significantly and a significant backlog of capital asset replacement schemes finally getting underway.