A national approach to power quality and the minimization of negative impacts on an economy

South Africa\´s National Electricity Regulator (NER) has the primary aims of reducing the cost of electricity, ensuring equity and sustaining electrification. The regulator has further declared the intent to regulate issue and retention of licenses to generate, transmit and distribute electricity on the basis of minimum technical quality of supply (QOS) as well as quality of service standards. The electricity supply industry has at the regulator\´s request developed a set of minimum technical standards for quality of supply and a set of service quality standards. Eskom the large parastatal electricity utility has over three years developed a product orientated approach to the quality of electricity. This paper describes the role of technical QOS standards and the economic application of the network and highly leveraged "behind the meter" approaches to quality of supply problems.