Indonesia’s OBI Nickel–Cobalt Processing Plant Project

The OBI industrial zone in North Maluku has become one of Indonesia’s most strategically important nickel processing hubs, tied to global supply chains for batteries and advanced materials. This is a large-scale industrial project built around laterite nickel resources and hydrometallurgical processing (HPAL), with supporting infrastructure typical of modern nickel industrial parks.

In metallurgical plants—especially where arc furnaces and heavy rectification loads are present—power quality issues don’t stay “electrical.” They quickly become production risk:

• Unplanned downtime risk: sudden voltage instability and unbalance can trigger nuisance trips, force restarts, and interrupt smelting rhythm.

• Equipment stress and accelerated wear: repeated high-current events and harmonic heating raise thermal stress in transformers and upstream distribution gear—often showing up later as overheating, insulation aging, and higher failure probability.

• Quality and throughput pressure: unstable power makes processes harder to control. When the plant is running at high load, small disturbances can expand into larger operational disruptions and cost.

Metallurgical electric arc furnace (EAF) systems are classic non-linear, highly dynamic loads. Their electrical behavior changes across the three main stages—melting, oxidation, reduction—with the melting phase typically creating the most severe disturbances.

• Nonlinear, harmonic-rich load: arc furnaces and rectifier-driven equipment distort current waveforms and generate harmonics dominated by odd orders (5th, 7th, 11th, 13th)—the set most often associated with heating and distortion propagation in industrial networks.

• Large transformer capacity and heavy draw: furnace transformers commonly sit in the multi-MVA to tens-of-MVA class, so even short events create system-wide disturbance potential.

• Violent load swings by operating phase: during the melting stage, power demand peaks—and the frequency of short-circuit events rises due to arc initiation and charge collapse. The result is rapid, irregular current fluctuation, three-phase imbalance, and visible voltage instability.

• Flicker and instability sensitivity: the combination of fast swings and repeated events produces flicker-like behavior that impacts both production operation and upstream network stability.

This is why “static filtering only” often falls short in arc-furnace environments—the challenge is not just harmonics, but dynamic instability.

This project’s environment is particularly demanding because these effects occur under high power consumption, with furnace transformers commonly ranging from several MVA to tens of MVA, and under operating conditions where stability and uptime directly drive project economics.

So, this project required a solution that could do two things at once: clean up distortion and hold the bus stable while the load behaves unpredictably. Our Hybrid Dynamic Filter Compensation System was selected and configured to meet that reality, which can aligned to the actual behavior of arc-furnace-driven loads:

• Dynamic voltage stabilization under rapid load swings
  Our solution responds to fast current fluctuations and disturbance events, helping reduce flicker and stabilize operating conditions during high-intensity phases such as melting.

• Harmonic filtering to reduce distortion-driven stress
  By actively reducing harmonic content on the network, our product can help lower heating and electrical stress on transformers, feeders, and low-voltage distribution equipment—supporting more reliable long-term operation.

• Reactive power compensation to recover capacity and improve efficiency
  When reactive demand swings, our product will provide compensation to keep power factor healthier, reduce losses, and free up usable capacity during peak furnace demand.

• Support for unbalanced and irregular operating states
  Metallurgical systems frequently experience three-phase imbalance during short-circuit events and unstable arc conditions. Our product is designed to operate under these non-ideal conditions to help reduce their downstream impact.

• Operational simplicity for heavy-industry sites
  The system is deployed to run continuously with straightforward operation and maintenance routines—because in large metallurgical projects, “manageable on site” is part of performance.

With our system deployed, the operator (PT Halmahera Persada Lygend) gains a more stable power-quality baseline in a demanding metallurgical environment: fewer disturbance-driven interruptions, lower distortion stress on critical assets, improved usable capacity under peak load, and reduced maintenance friction. In practical terms, this supports steadier production, lower operating losses, and measurable economic benefits over continuous operation—especially during the most disruptive furnace phases.