Power Systems Engineering Research Center

PSERC Background Paper

What is Reactive Power?

Peter W. Sauer
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
September 16, 2003
Engineering talk
Reactive power is a quantity that is normally only defined for alternating current (AC)
electrical systems. Our U.S. interconnected grid is almost entirely an AC system where the
voltages and currents alternate up and down 60 times per second (not necessarily at the
same time). In that sense, these are pulsating quantities. Because of this, the power being
transmitted down a single line also pulsates - although it goes up and down 120 times per
second rather than 60. This power goes up and down around some average value - this
average value is called the real power and over time you pay for this in kilowatt-hours of
energy. If this average value is zero, then all of the power being transmitted is called
reactive power. You would not normally be charged for using reactive power because you
are consuming some energy half the time, and giving it all back the other half of the time for a net use of zero. To distinguish reactive power from real power, we use the reactive
power unit called VAR - which stands for Volt-Ampere-Reactive. Voltage in an electrical
system is analogous to pressure in a water system. Current in an electrical system is
analogous to the flow of water in a water system.
Lets go back to this notion that voltage and current may not go up and down at the same
time. When the voltage and current do go up and down at the same time, only real power is
transmitted. When the voltage and current go up and down at different times, reactive
power is being transmitted. How much reactive power and which direction it is flowing on a
transmission line depends on how different these two times are.
Two extreme examples of the time relationship between voltage and current are found in
inductors and capacitors. An inductor is a coil of wire that is used to make motors. A
capacitor is made of parallel conductive plates separated by an insulating material. The
electrical properties of these two devices are such that if they are both connected to the

same AC voltage source, the inductor absorbs energy during the same half cycle that the
capacitor is giving energy. And similarly, the inductor produces energy during the same half
cycle that the capacitor absorbs energy. Neither of them absorbs any real power over one
complete cycle. Thus, when a motor needs reactive power, it is not necessary to go all the
way back to electric power generators on the transmission grid to get it. You can simply put
a capacitor at the location of the motor and it will provide the VARs needed by the motor.
This relieves the generator and all the lines between the generator and the motor of having
to transmit those VARs. They are provided locally by the capacitor. This means that with
the capacitors installed, the current in the lines will be smaller than when the capacitors are
not installed. This is a good thing because current in the lines causes heat and every line
can only handle a limited amount of current. Since the line current is smaller when the
capacitors are installed, the voltage drop along all the lines is also less, making it more
likely that the motor will have a voltage closer to the desired value. When there are not
enough VARs flowing locally to the loads, the generators must supply them remotely,
causing unnecessarily large currents and a resulting drop in voltage everywhere along the
path.
A physical analogy for reactive power
While there are numerous physical analogies for this quantity called reactive power, one
that is reasonably accurate is the process of filling a water tower tank with water - one
bucket at a time. Suppose you want to fill a water tower tank with water, and the only way
that you can do that is by climbing up a ladder carrying a bucket of water and then dumping
the water into the tank. You then have to go back down the ladder to get more water. Strictly
speaking, if you simply go up a ladder (not carrying anything) and come back down (not
carrying anything), you have not done any work in the process. But, since it did take work to
go up the ladder, you must have gotten all that energy back when you came down. While
you may not feel that coming down the ladder completely restores you to the condition you
were in before you went up, ideally, from an energy conversion viewpoint, you should! If you
dont agree, get out your physics book and check out the official definition of doing work.
OK, if you still dont agree that walking up a ladder and coming back down does not require
any net work, then think of it this way. Would you pay anyone to walk up a ladder and back
down without doing anything at the top? Probably not. But, if they dumped a bucket of water
in the tank while they were at the top, then that would be something worth paying for.
When you carry a bucket of water up the ladder you do a certain amount of work. If you
dump the water at the top and carry an empty bucket down, then you have not gotten all
your energy back (because your total weight coming down is less than going up), and you
have done work during that process. The energy that it takes to go up and down a ladder
carrying nothing either way requires reactive power, but no real power. The energy that it
takes to go up a ladder carrying something and come down without carrying anything
requires both real power and reactive power.

A reminder here is that power is the time rate of energy consumption, so consuming 500
Watts of real power for 30 minutes uses 250 Watt-hours of energy (or 0.25 kilowatt-

hours which costs about 2.5 cents to generate in the U.S.). The analogy is that voltage in an
AC electrical system is like the person going up and down the ladder. The movement of the
water up the ladder and then down into the tank is like the current in an AC electrical
system.
Now, this pulsating power is not good in an electrical system because it causes pulsations
on the shafts of motors and generators which can fatigue them. So, the answer to this
pulsation problem is to have three ladders going up to the water tower and have three
people climb up in sequence (the first person on the first ladder, then the second person on
the second ladder, then the third person on the third ladder) such that there is always a
steady stream of water going into the tank. While the power required from each person is
pulsating, the total result of all three working together in perfect balanced, symmetrical
sequence results in a constant flow of water into the tank this is why we use 3-phase
electrical systems where voltages go up and down in sequence (first A phase, then B
phase, and finally C phase).
In AC electrical systems, this sequential up/down pulsation of power in each line is the heart
of the transmission of electrical energy. As in the water tower analogy, having plenty of
water at ground level will not help you if you cannot get it up into the tower. While you may
certainly be strong enough to carry the bucket, you cannot get it there without the ladder. In
contrast, there may be a ladder, but you may not be strong enough to carry the water.
However, the people do take up room around the water tower and limit how much water can
go up and down over a period of time - just as reactive power flow in an electrical system
requires a larger current which limits how much real power can be transmitted. 1
To make the system more reliable, we might put two sets of three ladders leading up to the
tank on the tower. Then, if one set fails (maybe the water plus the person get too heavy and
the ladder breaks), the other set picks up the slack (that is, has to carry more water). But,
this could eventually overload the second set so that it too fails. This is a cascading outage
due to the overloading of ladders.
How is reactive power related to the problem of voltage collapse?
In terms of this water-carrying analogy, the frequency of going up and down the ladder
should be nearly constant (that, is like our 60 cycles per second electrical frequency). So,
when more water is needed, the amount that each person carries up the ladder must get
bigger (since they are not allowed to go faster or slower). Well, if this water gets too heavy,
either the ladder might break, or the person might get too tired to carry it. We could argue
that if the ladder breaks, that is like the outage of a transmission line that either sags or
breaks under the stress of too much current. There are devices called relays in an electrical
system that are supposed to sense when the load is too much and send a signal to a circuit
breaker to remove the line from service (like removing the set of three ladders). If the
person gets too tired, we could again stretch this analogy to say that this is like not having
enough reactive power (resulting in low

1 Another analogy that says that reactive power is the foam on the beer is fairly good here because the
space in the glass is taken up by the useless foam - leaving less room for the real beer.

voltage). In the extreme case, the person might collapse under the weight of the water that
the person is being asked to carry. If it happens to one person, it will probably happen to
many of them. In the electrical system this could be considered a voltage collapse. While
there are undervoltage relays, there are no relays in the system to directly sense the
problem that the voltage is about to collapse.
Remember, the people going up and down the ladders do not absorb or produce energy
over a complete cycle and are therefore analogous to reactive power. It is the water going
up the ladder to fill the tank that absorbs real power that must be paid for. But, the real
power cannot be delivered without the reactive power. And, if there is not enough reactive
power (like with people going up and down the ladders), the real power delivery will
eventually fail.
In summary, a voltage collapse occurs when the system is trying to serve more load
than the voltage can support. A simulation has been prepared to illustrate voltage
collapse by simply using a system with an Eastern generator and customer load, a Western
generator and customer load, and East to West transmission lines. In the simulation, the
Eastern generator has a constrained supply of reactive power and progressive line outages
for unspecified reasons lead to a voltage collapse even when reactive power supply is
ample at the Western generator. The results of the simulation are available in Power Point
slides. (If you are connected to the Internet, click here to view the slides.)
In contrast to all of this, you could route a hose up the side of the water tower and simply
turn on the water and let the water flow in the hose to fill up the tank. The water pressure is
like voltage, and the water flow is like current. This type of system would be a direct current
(DC) system and would not involve reactive power at all. However, the concept of voltage
collapse is not unique to AC systems. A simple DC system consisting of a battery serving
light bulbs can be used to illustrate how too much load on a system can lead to a condition
where voltages drop to a critical point where adding more load results in less power
transmission - a form of voltage collapse. (If you are connected to the Internet, click here
to view Power Point slides illustrating DC voltage collapse.)

Contact Information
Peter W. Sauer PSERC Site Director Grainger Chair Professor Department of Electrical &
Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1406 W. Green St.
Urbana, IL 61801 Phone: 217-333-0394 E-mail: sauer@ece.uiuc.edu
Power Systems Engineering Research Center 428 Phillips Hall Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-5401 Phone: 607-255-5601

2003 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Reactive Power
Reactive Power Compensation
Reactive Power can best be described as the quantity of unused power that is developed by
reactive components, such as inductors or capacitors in an AC circuit or system. In a DC circuit,
the product of volts x amps gives the power consumed in watts by the circuit. However, while
this formula is also true for purely resistive AC circuits, the situation is slightly more complex in
an AC circuits containing reactive components as this volt-amp product can change with
frequency.
In an AC circuit, the product of voltage and current is expressed as volt-amperes (VA) or kilo volt-amperes
(kVA) and is known as Apparent power, symbol S. In a non-inductive purely resistive circuit such as
heaters, irons, kettles and filament bulbs, etc. their reactance is practically zero, and the impedance of the
circuit is composed almost entirely of just resistance.
For an AC resistive circuit, the current and voltage are in-phase and the power at any instant can be
found by multiplying the voltage by the current at that instant, and because of this in-phase relationship,
the rms values can be used to find the equivalent DC power or heating effect.
However, if the circuit contains reactive components, the voltage and current waveforms will be out-ofphase by some amount determined by the circuits phase angle. If the phase angle between the voltage
and the current is at its maximum of 90 o, the volt-amp product will have equal positive and negative
values.
In other words, the reactive circuit returns as much power to the supply as it consumes resulting in the
average power consumed by the circuit being zero, as the same amount of energy keeps flowing
alternately from source to the load and back from load to source. Like LC oscillations..
Since we have a voltage and a current but no power dissipated, the expression of P = IV (rms) is no
longer valid and it therefore follows that the volt-amp product in an AC circuit does not necessarily give
the power consumed. Then in order to determine the real power, also called Active power,
symbol P consumed by an AC circuit, we need to account for not only the volt-amp product but also the
phase angle difference between the voltage and the current waveforms given by the equation:VI.cos.
Then we can write the relationship between the apparent power and active or real power as:

Note that power factor (PF) is defined as the ratio between the active power in watts and the apparent
power in volt-amperes and indicates how effectively electrical power is being used. In a non-inductive
resistive AC circuit, the active power will be equal to the apparent power as the fraction of P/S becomes
equal to one or unity. A circuits power factor can be expressed either as a decimal value or as a
percentage.

But as well as the active and apparent powers in AC circuits, there is also another power component that
is present whenever there is a phase angle. This component is called Reactive Power (sometimes
referred to as imaginary power) and is expressed in a unit called volt-amperes reactive, (VAr),
symbol Q and is given by the equation: VI.sin.
Reactive power, or VAr, is not really power at all but represents the product of volts and amperes that are
out-of-phase with each other. The amount of reactive power present in an AC circuit will depend upon the
phase shift or phase angle between the voltage and the current and just like active power, reactive power
is positive when it is supplied and negative when it is consumed.
The relationship of the three elements of power, active power, (watts) apparent power, (VA) and reactive
power, (VAr) in an AC circuit can be represented by the three sides of right-angled triangle. This
representation is called a Power Triangle as shown:

Power in an AC Circuit

From the above power triangle we can see that AC circuits supply or consume two kinds of power: active
power and reactive power. Also, active power is never negative, whereas reactive power can be either
positive or negative in value so it is always advantageous to reduce reactive power in order to improve
system efficiency.
The main advantage of using AC electrical power distribution is that the supply voltage level can be
changed using transformers, but transformers and induction motors of household appliances, air
conditioners and industrial equipment all consume reactive power which takes up space on the
transmission lines since larger conductors and transformers are required to handle the larger currents
which you need to pay for.

Reactive Power Analogy with Beer

In many ways, reactive power can be thought of like the foam head on a pint or glass of beer. You pay the
barman for a full glass of beer but only drink the actual liquid beer which is always less than a full glass.
This is because the head (or froth) of the beer takes up additional wasted space in the glass leaving less
room for the real beer that you consume, and the same idea is true for reactive power.
But for many industrial power applications, reactive power is often useful for an electrical circuit to have.
While the real or active power is the energy supplied to run a motor, heat a home, or illuminate an electric
light bulb, reactive power provides the important function of regulating the voltage thereby helping to
move power effectively through the utility grid and transmission lines to where it is required by the load.
While reducing reactive power to help improve the power factor and system efficiency is a good thing, one
of the disadvantages of reactive power is that a sufficient quantity of it is required to control the voltage
and overcome the losses in a transmission network. This is because if the electrical network voltage is not
high enough, active power cannot be supplied. But having too much reactive power flowing around in the
network can cause excess heating (I2R losses) and undesirable voltage drops and loss of power along the
transmission lines.

Power Factor Correction of Reactive Power :

One way to avoid reactive

power charges, is to install power factor correction capacitors. Normally residential customers are
charged only for the active power consumed in kilo-watt hours (kWhr) because nearly all residential and
single phase power factor values are essentially the same due to power factor correction capacitors being
built into most domestic appliances by the manufacturer.
Industrial customers, on the other hand, which use 3-phase supplies have widely different power factors,
and for this reason, the electrical utility may have to take the power factors of these industrial customers
into account paying a penalty if their power factor drops below a prescribed value because it costs the
utility companies more to supply industrial customers since larger conductors, larger transformers, larger
switchgear, etc, is required to handle the larger currents.
Generally, for a load with a power factor of less than 0.95 more reactive power is required. For a load with
a power factor value higher than 0.95 is considered good as the power is being consumed more
effectively, and a load with a power factor of 1.0 or unity is considered perfect and does not use any
reactive power.
Then we have seen that apparent power is a combination of both reactive power and active power.
Active or real power is a result of a circuit containing resistive components only, while reactive power
results from a circuit containing either capacitive and inductive components. Almost all AC circuits will
contain a combination of these R, L and C components.
Since reactive power takes away from the active power, it must be considered in an electrical system to
ensure that the apparent power supplied is sufficient to supply the load. This is a critical aspect of
understanding AC power sources because the power source must be capable of supplying the necessary
volt-amp (VA) power for any given load.

Reactive power maintains voltage by