Richard Harrison wrote:

Cecil, W5DXP wrote:
"Any power engineering handbook will tell you what happens to the phase
when the power factor is corrected."

Most industrial loads have a lagging power factor. They represent an
inductive reactance in addition to their resistive loads. Extra energy
must be generated and transmitted just to charge this inductance which
does no work but demands current. Extra loss comes from this reactive
load. This is eliminated by tuning the inductance out with a capacitive
reactance at the load.

Yet W8JI would have us believe that power factor correcting capacitor
functions faster than the speed of light, making an instantaneous
phase correction. Sorry, the real world doesn't work that way.

The bottom line is that we cannot shift phase without delaying
something, either voltage or current. Contrary to the presuppositions
of the lumped-circuit model, neither voltage nor current can travel
faster than the speed of light. That means that any phase shifting
of the relative phase angle difference down to zero results in a
delay.

I have seen it explained as "apparently" traveling faster than
light. That's just one more patch on an already flawed mode.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp