Assessing the Collective Harmonic Impact of Modern Residential Loads—Part I: Methodology

The proliferation of power-electronic-based residential loads has resulted in significant harmonic distortion in the voltages and currents of residential distribution systems. There is an urgent need for techniques that can determine the collective harmonic impact of these modern residential loads. These techniques can be used, for example, to predict the harmonic effects of mass adoption of compact fluorescent lights. In response to the need, this paper proposes a bottom-up, probabilistic harmonic assessment technique for residential feeders. The method models the random harmonic injections of residential loads by simulating their random operating states. This is performed by determining the switching-on probability of a residential load based on the load research results. The result is a randomly varying harmonic equivalent circuit representing a residential house. By combining multiple residential houses supplied with a service transformer, a probabilistic model for service transformers is also derived. Measurement results have confirmed the validity of the proposed technique. The proposed model is ideally suited for studying the consequences of consumer behavior or regulatory policy changes.