Evening star., 1933-04-02
Power Holds Great Promise
Continued From First Page.)

Continued From First Page)
mestic rate of 63 cents in 1929 to 5.6
cents in 1882.
Three million electric refrigerators
had something to do with this increased
call of the home upon the power plants;
and the sales generals of power are
counting on the electric cooking stove,
the electric water heater and other re-
Gently improved household appliances
to increase the home demand in 1888
to yet higher levels. One of the man
ufacturerS has mounted portable
electric kitchen on a motor truck and
it is travelling the country in an in
tensive campaign to promote home
electrification. A power company in
Connecticut has adopted the novel idea
of renting ranges, offering them to it's
customers at 80 cents a week, and in
Maine a similar plan is placing electric
water heaters in homes
Economic Use of Range.
can electric range can be used eco
nOmically where a domestic rate of
3 cents a kilowatt hour is available" :"
explained L. w. w. Morrow, editor of
Electric World, land in about 70 per
cent of the United States such a rate
may now be had. The electric water
heater Is economical at a rate of "
cents a kilowatt hour-and in certain
American cities domestic current may
be had at that figure.
"The thing that will bring cheap elec-
tricity is more consumption. If all the
homes in America would double or
treble their use of electricity the effect
would be to lower the price. The aver
age electrified home is using something
over 600 kilowatt hours in year. Put
an electric range in that home and you
Immediately add $500 kiloWatt hours
to the. annual power requirements-it
takes that much on the average for a
years cooking. Then if you put in an
electric water heater an additional g.
900 kilowatt hours a year will be re-
quired to feed its coils. Thus these two
appliances will multiply the nome de-
mand for electric energy eightfold-
and with that increased load rates
would go down"
But the utility strategists in many
cities are faced with the problem of at
tanning some reduction of rates now in
order to win public acceptance of these
new household units with their heavy
consuming requirements. To bring rates
down, more and yet more operating
efhciencies must be attained. Thus the
problem rests finally on the men whose
job is that of deviSing machines and
processes and hook-ups to do a me-
chanical task bit faster than it was
ever done before, bit more econom-
ically, a bit better.
And power is a bigger thing than
the power industry" said George A.
Orrok of New York, international au-
thority on power engineering designer
and supervisor of installations. II have
been interested in tabulating all the va
riouS prime movers or generators Of
mechanical energy. They include water
wheels, turbines, locomotives and other
steam engines, gasoline, oil, gas and
other internal combustion engines-a
grand total in the United States aggre-
eating 1,193,000000 horsepower"
One horsepower is rated as equiva-
lent to six manpower. On this COM
putation. if it were necessary to load
onto human muscles the work capacity
represented by the total combined me-
chanical horsepower of the United
States, more than 7,000000,000 men
would be needed! The world hasn't
that many people.
More than half our total horse
power" continued Mr.. Orrok, "is in
stalled not in mighty waterfalls or
giant steam plants, but-where do you
suppose? In automobiles. The 26,000,-
600 automobiles of America aggregate
CSC, ,00O, 900 horsepower. The central
stations of all the public power COM
panieS Gncluding railroads and trolleys)
total just around 50,000,000 horsepower F"
Individual Power Source.
About $4,000 000 horsepower is rep
resented in individual installations in
factories and other industrial plants
Textile mills, chemical works, sugar re-
flneries and others require steam and
heat as well as electricity in their proc
esses. Many of them find it advan-
tageouS to operate their own boilers,
pass the steam through an engine or
turbine to generate power, and then to
use the spent steam in their manufac-
turing. Lower costs of fuels since 1929
have accelerated the tendency to de-
velop small individual plants, and many
factories are now rolling their own
1T is an engineering fact, however" +"
continued Mr. Orrok, that a steam
unit of less than $4,000 kilowatt ca
pacity cannot be operated as economi-
cally as larger ones, irrespective of the
temporary advantage that cheap fuel
may seem to give. Power will increas-
ingly become central station product.
The tendency of central stations is to
locate near the city or place of con-
sumption and to avoid long transmits
sions OF power"
THE superpower" and giant power"
programs, which were so actively to
the fore six or eight years ago, have