The power quality disturbance (PQD) problem involves problems of voltage swell, voltage sag, power interruption, harmonics and complex events involving multiple PQD problems. The PQD problem attracted considerable attention from utilities, especially when renewable energy is getting a higher penetration. The PQD problem could downgrade the service quality, causing problems of malfunctions and instabilities. This paper proposed a simplified SVM technique to identify the PQD problem including the multiple PQD classification. With the simple structure proposed, the methodology could reduce a great deal of training data; requires much less memory space and saves computing time. An IEEE 14-bus power system was used to show the performance. Many tests were conducted, and the method was compared with an artificial neural network (ANN). Simulation results showed the shortened processing time and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.