Good and Bad Load Shedding
An advertisement appeared in the Manchester Guardian last week which, since it was addressed to electricity authorities and con- cerned something called ripple'injection, was probably dismissed by most readers as a technical matter of no direct interest to lay- men. But in fact it cannot be dismissed by anyone who has suffered from power cuts. Ripple injection is a device whereby an electricity supply authority can switch off part of the load in an emergency. The part which is to be switched off can be selected in advance and obviously the least vital load would be so selected. For example, water-heaters could be temporarily cut off at the peak period with a minimum of inconvenience (and a saving of cost) to consumers, while factories, hospitals and other essential services. carried on without interruption: This device is no crank invention. It is one of several instruments ekamined and recommended by the Clow Committee, which was set up in 1948 to study the peak- load problem. Nor is ripple injection an untried device. It is operated on a limited scale in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Spain and France. It has even been used by a small undertaking in this country with complete success, reducing the consumption of current, increasing the profits of the undertaking and cutting the charges to consumers. Why then, in the name of sanity, does the British Electricity Authority not adopt this instrument, or some other of the devices recommended by the expert Clow Committee and accepted by the then Minister of Kiel and Power, Mr. Gaitskell ? W14 does it maintain silence on proposals for spreading the load and reserve its energies for demands for more and more generating plant at higher and higher cost ? Is it that the B.E.A. Rill has a pre-war mentality, and thinks that its task is to meet all demands for current, however unreasonable ?
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