HURRY! THE PAINT IS RUNNING OUT

Environmentalists and other Johnny-come-latelies of energy economics have lovingly embraced this idea as one that (they think) conserves energy. That reminds us of the man who was furiously painting away at his fence; asked why he was in such a hurry, he answered "There's 3 more yards of fence to do, and I am running out of paint!"

A little thought will show that peak shaving by rate structure will not save any energy; what it will save is capital expenditures. A utility that burns its fuel evenly during the day instead of burning most of it during the peak hours is still burning the same total amount of fuel (except for insignificant ramifications that do not affect the main principle); and the same amount of fuel would also be burnt by a hypothetical utility rich enough to avoid peak-hour headaches by investing in double the capacity, with half of it lying idle except during the peak hours.

A little thought is, of course, exactly what the scholars of pseudo-consumerism refuse to indulge in; they prefer to make fools of themselves by unwittingly campaigning for fatter utility profits.

Why, then, do utilities not adopt this magic rate structure?

They do - for their large industrial customers, where a little recording and switching gear will meter large amounts of energy, and hence justify the investment. But for millions of households, each of which consumes only around 30 kWh per day, does the cost of millions of switching, recording, signaling and monitoring instruments pay off?

Until recently, the answer was a flat No. Even the simple clocks that turn on electric space heaters with large thermal capacity (heavy ceramic blocks) have not paid off in the US, though they have long been used in Europe.

Now things may change. Thanks, in part, to societally relevant lawyers and other warriors for the public interest, the cost of installing new capacity has more than doubled over the last decade, and in many cases it has quite simply been outlawed. The crusaders against waste have so raised the price of electricity that it now makes sense to use what was formerly considered wasteful.

But there have also been important technical innovations. The minicomputer can replace the inflexible clock, and twoway communication between consumer terminals and computer substations is maintained by signals traveling along power lines (or, in some systems, along telephone lines) to monitor consumption, record it for billing at different rates, and in some cases, to switch water heaters on and off. At least one system does so by radio. The anti-technologists who set out to curb technology have now pushed electronic metering and management right into your bathroom. There is, however, one big saving in the many new systems now being tested by several utilities in a program eosponsored by the EPRI and (ex-)ERDA: In most of the twozay communication systems, the slow, expensive and errorprone work of the meter man will be eliminated the central computers can read 40,000 meters in 50 seconds. [More: IEEE Spectrum, Aug. 77, where further literature is given.]