Sri Lanka is facing an energy crisis; domestic and industrial customers of electricity gets impacted by this. As a result, customers seek ways of minimizing their energy usage therefore, lowering the electricity cost.
In the domestic market of Sri Lanka, the most common way of minimizing the electricity cost is switching from incandescent lamp to LED lamps or other means of lighting (i.e. compact florescent lamps). They consume a lesser amount of energy than incandescent lights and provide equal amount of light output.
In Sri Lanka the market for these devices is unregulated. Therefore, different types of poor-quality LED lamps come into the market day by day. Studies have shown that poor-quality LED lamps create power quality issues like harmonic issues [1] which could interfere with other equipment in the system; and distortion in waveform [2].
Typical customer would be unaware about this matter. Therefore, a detailed study needs to be carried out about the quality of LED lamps in the domestic market and their integrated effect on the entire network. Which will highlight the importance of regulation of the penetration of poor-quality LED lamps into the domestic market.
[1] Lin, N. Huang and M. Zhu, "The study of the power quality emission characteristics of different types of lamps and their impacts on distribution systems," 2016 IEEE 11th Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), Hefei, 2016, pp. 613-618
[2] Ananwattanaporn and A. Ngaopitakkul, "Power quality analysis in light emitting diode lamps," 2016 17th International Scientific Conference on Electric Power Engineering (EPE), Prague, 2016, pp. 1-6