Engaging with customers with poor power factor

We identified customers with poor power factor and offered advice on how they can reduce their losses and in turn their electricity costs.

We have been taking steps to minimise losses on our network by investing in new technology, lowering voltages and utilising smart meter data to pinpoint and target losses.

However, we have also been thinking about how we can help industrial and commercial customers to minimise their losses. We wanted to engage with these customers to offer advice related to power factor, which we use as an indication of how efficiently the power supply is being utilised.

Customers with poor power factor can materially impact losses on the network. The power factor values we attribute reflect the amount of ‘real power’ that is absorbed compared to the ‘reactive power’ flowing in the circuit. Poor power factor is often caused by equipment such as motors or transformers that use lots of reactive power, which ultimately costs our customers more money whilst increasing their carbon footprint.

We wanted to raise awareness of the issue and so we engaged with customers, holding briefings at our Connections Customer Forum and Stakeholder Summit. We created an information guide for customers with practical advice on how to correct poor power factor and published it on our website where it has been downloaded 147 times. Our guide was also published on the Carbon Trust’s website.

We used metering data to identify customers’ with poor power factor and sent an email to 249 of them with a link to our guide and an invitation to contact us should they need more information, support or advice.

• Our power factor guide is available one our website here