[mejunkhound]

My 2 cents worth:

EU has had harmonic requirements for over 20 years.

USA does not.

Why _ most heavy power users and high efficiency systems already have PFC circuits as part of the rectification circuitry (e.g UC3854 chip, $2); heck, even the Klimaire 1.5T inverter driven mini-split I bought 2 years ago from China has a PFC front end. Why: the typical PFC circuit boosts 120 Vac to a stable 200V vs drifting 170
vdc, or 240 Vac to 400 Vdc, which makes the inverter design simpler and more efficient, while at the same time raising PF to 95% to 99%.

I suspect that ICanHas is in the business sector that sells power factor correction circuits or else got burnt by ignoring harmonics in one of his designs?

Modern wild frequency aircraft power systems have very high harmonics - there is a BIG weight penalty for aircraft to correct all harmonics. Many vendors/suppliers overlooked the line harmonics in the specs when they built their power supplies, and the supplies went belly up in initial testing giving the incompetent designer a black eye. Perhaps icanhas is one of the design engineers who did not read the power system specs so now caterwhalls about wanting a clean power system.

Biggest impact for POCO is triplett harmonics, as those turn to heat in delta-wye distribution transformers. A high power VFD (most of which have PFC circuits anyway) usually have their own phase shift transformers - say with a straight 24 pulse rectifier, there are primarily 23rd and 25th harmonics, not divisible by 3.

Not to say there are not horror stories about harmonics, but overall economics for the user pretty much dictates PFC circuits anyway.

The EU harmonic requirements are a result of Europe having mostly government run power systems - easier for them to legislate on harmonics vs letting the free market fix the problem itself.

Example - cheap Chinese 6W LED bulbs with no PFC*, replacing 60 W incandescent. Power reduced by a factor of 10, good trade against a few mV of harmonics. If that $4 LED bulb had to add even 50 cents due to PFC circuit, the 54W generating saving would not be taken advantage of by a larger population segment.

* I have a cheap open CFL in hand, and am looking at the circuit - easy to do, one sided circuit board and no ICs. 4 diodes, small inductor, 10uF 200
v cap, 2 4124L (fets?) drivers to small transformer - saves over 50W for same 500 lumens, adds about 10 mA or less harmonics to input current waveform.

As far as DIY folks 'polluting' the grid, what a crock - there are so few DIY that use multi HP non PFC VFD that it is a teaspoon in the ocean.