Reactive power is undesirable in electricity generating and transmission equipment as it leads to larger than necessary currents and hence larger than necessary losses for the distribution companies. As reactive power can be either positive or negative, this leads to the concept of cancelling it out. In most cases, the reactive power is inductive and can therefore be cancelled out with banks of capacitors. A circuit for doing this is called a Boucherot cell.AES article on Boucherot retrieved 2017-12-17.
