A New Index for Voltage Quality Assessment at Distribution Systems

Analysis of power quality problems in distribution systems is getting important day-by-day because of the increase in vulnerable non-linear loads, such as data centers across the Globe. Regulatory authorities all over the world investigate these problems in order to serve in better conditions to the users. In this article we analyzed power quality problems in terms of their effects to the users, and developed an index to observe the problematic areas. As different types of loads in terms of operation criticality, are fed through the same distribution system, same power quality event may have different effects to their operation. The proposed Event Ranking Index (ERI) is capable of presenting a ranking among the affected loads based on the characteristic properties of the realized event and operational criticality of the considered loads. This ranking can be used to identify risky regions of the considered distribution system.