6. Conclusion

As with all high-power equipment powered by electricity, the concern not to disturb other users or equipment on the network has led to a high degree of standardization. The disturbance caused by arc furnaces has already been described, and differs from that caused by other equipment with comparable or higher power ratings, such as large variable speed drives (40 MW for petrochemical steam crackers) or large power supplies (800 MW for aluminum smelters). In fact, the notion of high power must be reconciled with the short-circuit power S _cc . As furnaces are unstable loads, we have attempted to characterize the disturbances generated on the networks, to present the conventional means of compensating for them, and to envisage possible solutions for a future that is already present, on a technical level, but still problematic from an economic point...