A new method based on phase-shift and N - 1 Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is presented for power quality (PQ) disturbance detection and identification. Through phase-shift and simple algebra operation,the method detects out the PQ disturbances easily and effectively. Then a data dealing process is carried out to extract features from the detecting outputs. Then SVM theory is introduced into the identification of PQ disturbances. N kinds of PQ disturbances are classified with an N - 1 SVMs classifier. The testing results show that the proposed method can detect and classify the PQ disturbances successfully. Moreover, the classifier has a good performance on training speed and correct ratio.