Toward Voltage-Quality Regulation in Italy

Abstract

The Italian regulatory authority is working toward the introduction of voltage-quality regulation. To this end, it initiated a power-quality measuring campaign and a study of customer costs. This paper summarizes the main results of these activities and provides evidence that economic losses due to very short interruptions and voltage dips can be very relevant for several sensitive industrial sectors in Italy. Despite the fact that these losses present an uneven distribution over the national economy, their magnitude justifies the intervention of a regulatory authority to limit the number of the most severe events. Nonetheless, the identification of severe events (those that fall under the responsibility of the network operator) is a difficult task. Using the available data, we test the classification table proposed in the latest version of the European Standard EN 50160 and confirm, albeit preliminarily, the usefulness of this classification for regulatory purposes.