Jindal

Hitachi Energy has installed a Static Var Compensator (SVC) rated at 33 kV, 0-200 Mvar capacitive at Jindal Steel & Power Ltd (JSPL), Raigarh, India.

The SVC was commissioned in 2009. In steel plants, Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF) are troublesome loads on the feeding three-phase power supply, usually the public grid. The EAF has strong and stochastically fluctuating reactive power consumption, which, unless remedied, will lead to voltage fluctuations and flicker. Furthermore, the EAF acts as an unbalanced load, creating negative-phase sequence components in currents and voltages, which will have a detrimental impact on other installations connected to the same grid as the EAF. Also, due to a low power factor of the EAF, the system losses are high, which is unfavourable from the point of view of electric energy consumption per unit steel. And finally, the EAF is a strong source of harmonics. SVC is an efficient means of mitigating these mentioned impediments to power quality in the plant as well as in the feeding grid. As additional benefits, productivity and process economy can be improved.