ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Addressing two common issues in healthcare facilities
Kas Mohammed, Vice-President of Digital Energy at Schneider Electric, looks at two of the more common electrical issues encountered in hospitals and other healthcare facilities – power factor distortion and harmonics – and how to address them.
We are at the beginning of a new chapter. The pandemic has changed our lives and businesses forever. While we will continue to strive for greater efficiency, resilience and robustness will become key priorities as society looks to protect itself against any future shocks. Central to building economic resilience is maintaining a functioning and healthy populace. The last 12 months have shown the vital, and often overlooked, importance of the healthcare sector, which acts as the foundation of society in general. As well as supporting key workers, we must invest in healthcare infrastructure to meet the challenges ahead.
The importance of the electrical infrastructure within healthcare is indisputable. We rely on electrical equipment to keep our loved ones safe and healthy, diagnose conditions, and find new forms of treatment. Hospitals, therefore, require an extremely reliable electrical infrastructure, immune to power failures, and resilient against any issues. Healthcare organisations face an average cost of £530,000 per outage, according to a Ponemon Institute/ Emerson Network Power report. This excludes loss of life and any indirect impacts of outages in these critical environments. As a speaker in a global panel discussion of healthcare executives recently put it, ‘the potential costs of unreliable power in healthcare are unimaginable’.
Power quality disturbances Power quality disturbances are a significant cause of issues in the electrical distribution system. Somewhat frustratingly, it is often the electrical equipment itself which causes electrical disturbances. In fact, 80 per cent of power quality issues originate on site, with the other 20 per cent attributable to the energy provider. Onsite issues occur largely because the components within the equipment distort the electrical signal due to having loads which are non-linear current, and voltage changes, such as occur with variable speed drives and
Schneider Electric says: “To select the best solution, we must first understand which particular power quality issue we are trying to fix.”
semiconductor technology, including LED lighting. These distortions can manifest in a multitude of ways, including, typically: n Network communication issues. n Circuit breakers tripping. n Data loss. n Flickering lights. n Unexpected equipment shutdown. n Transformers humming.
This list is far from exhaustive, but gives an idea of the type of disturbances to look out for. Ultimately, if the issues go untreated, the results are a reduction in efficiency, increased operating costs, and damaged assets. The good news is that these issues can be easily fixed with the right solutions. However, to select the best solution, we must first understand which particular power quality issue we are trying to fix. Within a hospital, we largely see two types of issues – power factor distortion and harmonics.
Power factor issues
Power factor issues come about when current and voltage signals do not align with one another, i.e., there is a phase difference between them. A power factor
of 1 means that current and voltage are aligned, and anything below this means there is a phase difference between the signals. This ultimately leads to reactive, sometimes referred to as imaginary, power being generated. This power is unusable, but still charged for in the same way on the consumer’s electricity bill, meaning that in healthcare circles, say, an NHS Trust is paying more for its power, but getting less out of it.
In fact, the cost implications of a low power factor can go far beyond this. As the power factor does not self-correct, the power we feed back into the grid will maintain any power factor effects caused by equipment on a particular site. Due to the monetary and sustainability implications of this at a grid level, the Government has applied a reactive power charge to sites which are feeding low power factor signals back into the grid. These show up as an extra line on the user’s electricity bill, and mean that, combined with the costs spent on the reactive power itself, the Trust or other healthcare provider is essentially paying twice for something which is unusable.
April 2021 Health Estate Journal 53
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