The power quality gap between power user needs and power providers' consistent delivery continues to widen. End users require increasingly higher quality grades of delivered power for reliable operation of their facility-wide process critical loads in order to maximize their uptime and operations' profitability. Due to a worldwide tide of deregulated energy markets, electric utilities are forced to re-organize themselves by increasing asset utilization and reducing maintenance costs while better serving their critical customer needs. Each year, new designs of power quality protection devices are introduced in power equipment markets. These designs, when applied as intended, provide a degree of power quality grade improvement for a specific price per kVA. Some solutions provide the same degree of improvement more economically than others.

This paper presents a number of solutions primarily for medium voltage distribution applications, and their Power Quality disturbance mitigation capability. Specifically, the capability of various high speed transfer switches; static series compensators; and UPS's, both static and rotary shunt are explored for their optimal applications.

Janos Rajda is with SatCon Power Systems, a "design, build and service" company that sells power conditioners for distributed generation and power quality protection. His responsibilities include application engineering and project management for power quality / reliability systems and has been granted several US patents for innovative power product designs.