Meeting the Capacity Crisis

Abstract

The most serious problem faced by the British Electricity Authority in 1948 was the chronic disequilibrium of supply and demand.¹ For some years after the War there had been severe power cuts in winter, when demand reached its peak, because of shortages of both power station capacity and coal to burn in the plant that was available. In the fuel crisis of February 1947, an already overstretched system had been brought to breaking point: electricity supplies to many users had been periodically interrupted for weeks on end and other supplies had been restricted, in the severest winter for more than a hundred years. The situation had then improved, thanks partly to higher priorities for allocations of coal, steel and men to the electricity supply undertakings and partly to the milder weather in the winter of 1947/8. Even so, the industry had to cut off between 10 and 20 per cent of peak loads in these winters, despite attempts to reduce the peak demand by less drastic means. The latter included exhortations to consumers to switch off appliances, reductions in supply voltages by 5 per cent (which was considered the maximum tolerable limit), and encouragement to industrialists voluntarily to stagger their factory hours away from peak times.

You can’t fight a war and scrape right down to the bottom of the barrel, throwing in everything you’ve got, and then start up again as if nothing had happened.

Clement Attlee, quoted in Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961) p. 94.

In the whole history of engineering did anyone dream up anything more like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party?

Lord Hinton of Bankside, Heavy Current Electricity in the United Kingdom (1979) p. 69.