Distributed Harmonic Compensation for Power Quality in Smart Grids

It is now well known that the quality of electric power is a key factor for the electricity service. It defines how good the characteristics (amplitude and frequency) of the supplied power meet the rated ones. Voltage dip (or sag) and swell, short and long interruptions, voltage spike, under and over voltage, harmonic distortion, voltage unbalance are the common power quality problems. Among these last, the harmonics issue is getting more and more important over the last decades and this trend will surely continue its race. This is essentially due to the widespread use of electronic components in electric equipment: it changes the nature of the electric loads from linear to non-linear and makes them, on the one hand, responsible for the harmonics generation in the power grid but very sensitive to the power quality problems on the other hand.