An overview of international harmonics standards and guidelines (IEEE, IEC, EN, ER and STC) for low voltage system

Recent proliferate awareness of power quality issues is due to undesired phenomena experienced by engineers. This has caused many turned to international and local standards for guidance and solution. However, interpretation of power quality guidelines and recommendations from different international and local standards can pose a myriad of misunderstanding to readers. This is simply because of different philosophies and methodologies prompted by each standard for the same objective which is to minimize power quality phenomena in the electrical systems. Therefore, this paper aims to discuss the system level harmonic limits differences in selected standards. In addition, it summarizes the harmonic limits extracted from those respective standards. This paper does not intend to substitute nor recommend changes to any power quality standard instead to give a coherent comparative overview of harmonic limits in power quality standards.