Supplying electricity in most countries, is a profitable business because the cost of transportation and marketing is minimal. It is therefore worthwhile to analyze why the CEB is losing billions of rupees, as it is impossible to lose so much unless there is something very wrong.

According to my own experience with the CEB, what I can suggest is that the focus should be in the area of distribution losses. Normally, these losses are in the region of 15% and up to about 20% is still acceptable. In the eighties from a random survey I found that in the industrial sector the load power factor was in between 0.65 and 0.75 instead of 0.8. At that time, the cost of electricity was so low it was not economically viable to raise it to its maximum value of power factor. In order to compensate the supplier, the CEB had a system of charging for the KVA demand in addition to the units consumed. This practice was sufficient and was applicable considering the cost of electricity at the time. If CEB is yet continuing this practice, the losses in the system may be even as high as 30%. However, these losses can be reduced if the power factor is increased to unity.

At present, the cost of electricity has gone up to the extent that it is essential to take every step to save energy by raising the load power factor to its maximum level of unity power factor. When electric motors operate in industries they need two power components known as active and reactive. It is only the active component that does the work and needs to be supplied by the supply authorities. The other component can be supplied at site by capacitors instead of drawing current from the supply mains. This current if drawn from the supply mains is not even metered because it does not do any work other than creating a magnetizing field as required by the motors.

The problem that it increases losses in the entire power system and is proportional to the square of the magnitude of the current that the system has to accommodate. This redundant increase can be completely eliminated by getting all the industrialists to install power factor correcting equipment in their premises to raise the power factor to unity. In the past, capacitors had to be used for each an every motor individually, but today it is done automatically by installing one piece of equipment containing a bank of capacitors to switch ON or OFF automatically as required by the motors for the entire factory or workshop. The CEB should abandon the KVA charge if the industry maintains the unity power factor. The CEB will gain much more from this, by relieving the distribution system from the burden of carrying this reactive power unnecessarily.

The CEB has only to introduce regulations to make the industry maintain the power factor at unity as done in the other countries. Even the industrialists will benefit as the cost can be easily recovered by saving from paying for KVA demand within a couple of years or so. I am certain that by reducing the losses, daily 2 to 3 million units can be saved. When I did the survey there were about 5000 industries and at present this would have risen to over three times this number.

I wrote a lengthy article on this subject in the "Daily News" paper 19.07.83 with a statement emphasizing its importance. Had this been implemented, today we would have been in a better position. Pardon me if this problem has already been dealt with, of course not by maintaining only the supply power factor at the required level as one engineer commented erroneously at a discussion forgetting the fact that the load power factor has to be corrected individually only at site.