Is harmonic distortion costing you money and downtime?

  • Overview
  • Reduce risk
  • Impact on OPEX
  • Carbon accounting
  • Explore more about harmonic mitigation
  • Case stories
  • Contact us
Harmonic mitigation

Have you experienced production outages?

The following issues are related to poor power quality caused by harmonic distortion: 

  • Fuses blowing, circuit breakers opening, and equipment overheating
  • Measuring equipment, lighting, and communications equipment behaving oddly
  • Increased business carbon footprint due to more carbon dioxide emissions

Reduce risk

Are you willing to risk unnecessary downtime?

Have you experienced

  • Unplanned production stops?
  • Expensive loss of production due to downtime?
  • Failures to critical equipment “out of the blue”?
  • Motors and driven loads failing?

The cause is often poor network quality due to harmonic distortion.  Harmonic distortion causes damage to critical equipment leading to failures.

Adding drives (VSDs) to your system can improve network quality, massively reduce energy consumption, and manage driven loads to ensure breakdowns are minimized with good maintenance planning. Managing harmonic distortion using drives brings stability to the electrical grid and reduces outages.

The whole topic of network quality and how it impacts greenhouse gas accounting can be daunting. Luckily you don’t need to be the expert. Danfoss experts stand ready to support your business with expert advice and VSD solutions for energy savings and cost-effective harmonic mitigation.

Contact us for advice.

What is harmonic distortion? How to curb costs and still comply

Impact on OPEX

Are you paying too much for energy (OPEX)?

How does network quality affect operating costs? Poor power quality results in unnecessarily high electricity bills.

Check the electricity bill:

  • You may be surprised to find out how much you pay for poor power quality that does not contribute to operating your facility or plant, it just costs you money.
  • The cost of distortion power (kVAr) can be higher than the power being used to actively run the plant (kVA or kW).

Carbon accounting

How do drives (VSDs) affect greenhouse gas accounting?

Designing early for low total harmonic distortion mean smaller transformers, generators and switchgear components, which contain less materials, are lighter to transport and take less energy to manufacture.

Less fuel and energy is needed to operate the plant when VSDs are employed as widely as possible, compared with poorer control strategies, offsetting initial capital cost. This results in fewer greenhouse gas sources.

Learn how drives influence Scope 3 upstream emissions.

VSDs ensure minimum waste from the plant due to minimized breakdowns and downtime. Drives offer 10-year operating life without maintenance, and fewer plant breakdowns with smart condition-based monitoring to protect driven loads and the wider process.

When smaller high-capital equipment is purchased in the beginning, there is less waste to recycle when plant reaches end of life. Altogether, this reduction supports reduced carbon emissions.

How drives impact Scope 3 downstream emissions

VSDs always control the process to the optimal level for efficiency , throughput and quality. Controlling fans, pumps, and compressors brings the highest energy saving (2-60%), although conveyors and cranes and other applications also benefit greatly. Connect VSDs with motors of the highest efficiency class to maximize the benefits of both technologies, to reduce carbon emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Learn how drives influence Scope 2 emissions.

VSDs ensure the plant operates and produces output most efficiently, ensuring lowest possible direct emission from the processes.  Emissions can be measured and connected back to the VSD to manage setpoints of emissions directly and reduce waste during the manufacturing processes. VSDs can be used to treat unwanted greenhouse gas emissions emissions to reduce their impact.

Discover how drives impact Scope 1 emissions.

Explore more about harmonic mitigation

Case stories