PNNL

Abstract

Power engineers seemingly view the quantity “apparent power” as “decomposable.” The first decom¬position was formalized after 1901 (when reactive power was named), and became more or less “official” when the virtues of the Power Triangle were extolled in 1910. Since then, many more “types” of power have been identified, extracted from apparent power, an operational measure whose RMS calculations conceal any frequency-dependent information in the result. The various “types” of power have contributed to the formulation of a number of operationally-based Power Theories. This paper shows that the decomposition of apparent power is meaningless, that (as an example) apparent power and average power are not related quantities, and that Power Theories are failed attempts to explain an unrecognized measurement problem. If the effect of distortion is to be understood, it must be by means of representational measurements.