power factor correction

It depends upon who you are.

If you are the utility who is producing and distributing the power over a wide area, poor power factor means that your equipment must deliver more power than you can actually charge customers for as a kWh tariff. So what you would do is to penalize customers with poor power factor because they represent a larger proportion of your delivery costs.

If you are the end user, the only real reason to correct power factor is to avoid those penalties. If you are a large user who owns your own wide area distribution equipment, it may also mean being able to get more usable power out of your equipment as well.

First off power factor is the difference between real power and reactive power. The real power is the actual energy that is being used for work, and the reactive power are the losses of actual work which will turn up in your system as heat.

In a perfect world you want a power factor of 1 (unity), which means all the power you are generating is being used, but the number everyone shoots for is .8lag. The further your power factor lags depends on how much inductive load you have.

When people talk of power factor correction it normally means they have too much inductive load, and to correct this you add capacitance to your system usually in the form of capacitor banks, of which will bring your power factor back closer to unity.

As was mentioned earlier about the utility, if your power factor is extremely bad in your plant it causes the utility to use more fuel to generate the same real power, and in the modern age they can meter how much reactive power your plant is contributing to the system.

If you are a stand alone generating facility you can see how this applies to you as well. You must use more fuel to produce the same amount of work..

"of inductive loads"? Most usage of electricity is 'turned' into inductive loads. It is seldom that a capacitive load is produced from a compliance. Thus, the current will most of the time lag the voltage and the amount of real energy used is dependant on this factor. Improve your PF and pay less for the same amount of 'spent' energy.

Please do not post if you have no idea what you are talking about...

Loads are typically inductive OR RESISTIVE, not usually capacitive. Resistive loads need no PF correction.

Current is not the same as ENERGY, it is a component of energy. Correcting power factor will reduce the current used at the load, but it will NOT reduce the "spent energy" (whatever that means), other than as I stated above.