Where has all the power gone?
Energy efficiency is essential for creating a low-emission or even carbon-neutral future. It plays a crucial role in the transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles and minimizing the impact of power-hungry AI applications on data center energy consumption. Understanding where power is lost – whether in converters, motors, or data centers – is key to unlocking significant efficiency gains and addressing the growing demand for energy in a sustainable way.
Active power is the portion of power consumed by a system to perform useful work, such as driving motors, powering machines, or running devices. However, only the main power component directly contributes to this work; the rest, known as harmonic power, is lost as vibration, noise, and heat.
Reducing harmonics is therefore crucial for engineers to minimize energy losses.
Measuring harmonics accurately
A power analyzer calculates the efficiency of an electrical system like a motor or transformer by measuring both the fundamental and harmonic components of power. At high frequencies and high currents, this becomes challenging: accurate measurement requires high-quality current sensors. These sensors must not only maintain accuracy across the entire frequency range, but their phase shift also needs to be known in order to calculate power correctly. To make matters worse, the phase shift of a current sensor is typically frequency dependent. Unless a sensor has a consistent time delay across all frequencies, accurate power measurements are difficult – regardless of the analyzer used.

Current Sensors and Power Analyzer - Engineered Together
Identify Your Losses Accurately - Across All Frequencies

- Any phase shift introduced by the current sensors must be accurately compensated by the analyzer.
- The current sensors must provide a flat amplitude response across the entire frequency range.

Tracing Power Losses: Power Analyzer and Current Sensors from a Single Source