Abstract
THE problem of nation-wide electricity supply has undergone considerable changes in recent years. Electric power has been applied to many services, with the result that continuity of supply has now become almost essential to the life of the community. Economy in capital costs entails the reduction of spare plant to a minimum by creating a common pool. Economy in running costs necessitates the placing of the generating stations in such positions that fuel and water costs are reduced to a minimum. This has led to the linking up of distributing networks and power stations, and it is essential that the controlling engineer should be immediately informed of any appreciable change in the load on the networks. This subject was discussed in a paper read to the Institution of Electrical Engineers on February 7 by G. A. Burns and T. R. Rayner. They describe the automatic methods by means of which the engineer is at once informed of the state of the load at a distribution substation, and the methods by means of which the apparatus is started and circuits opened and closed without using any manual labour. There are already in service on various sections of the British grid 150 installations of the apparatus the authors described. It embodies automatic telephone apparatus spread over very wide areas. The components employed are the same as those incorporated in about eleven million lines of automatic telephones spread over practically every country in the world. This proves the robustness of construction and the stability of the apparatus components used in the system described in the paper. It is interesting to notice that the problems arising in connexion with the control, distribution and protection of power networks have been practically solved by the adaptation of methods and apparatus used in automatic telephony.
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Control of Power Networks. Nature 137, 488 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137488b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137488b0