Impact of Dimming LED Street Luminaires on Power Quality

More and more street lighting deployments use LED technology as a light source. Unfortunately, the new technology also brings some challenges with it that remain unnoticed until installed at scale. This article presents issues related to capacitive reactive power consumed by LED luminaires. The problem is even more profound if the luminaire is dimmed, because it consumes capacitive reactive power, which is very undesirable in the power system. Countermeasures in terms of reactive power compensation for a luminaire working with variable power and their effects are also presented. The article also contains the results of the harmonic analysis of the LED luminaires current for full power and dimmed operation.