J. Michael Pearson, P.E., Senior Electrical Engineer, DLR Group, Phoenix

Green Power

In this era of green architecture, there is one sustainability tool at our disposal that has been most underutilized—the technology of power-factor correction. In fact, the U.S. Green Building Council would do well to include power-factor correction as one of its credits for its Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design certification program. We engineers know power factor (PF) mainly as a mathematical expression of the efficiency with which electrical energy is used.