The New Nation - Internet Edition

Chittagong Correspondent

Country's ongoing power crisis may easily be cut down to a great extent simply by pushing power factor up at the distribution level without even setting up new generation unit, according to engineers looking for the practical way out of the problem.

Relatively low wattage but high performance devices may also help save at least 700 to 900 megawatts of power a day. Nearly 900-megawatt power is consumed a day only for lighting purpose all over the country. Common use of the energy saving bulb (ESB) may easily help save 80% of the electricity - around 720 megawatts.

Fast changing power consumption pattern of the subscribers in the recent decades has left adverse impact on the generation and the distribution system particularly in the form of power factor.

Power generation and management experts alleged that the issue of the 'power factor' had always been missing from the mind of the power policymakers and the distribution network designers.

Otherwise, installation of power factor compensation devices at the distribution points or at the consumers' end should have been made mandatory well before.

Electrical engineers say, generation and consumption of electricity have two inseparable components - the active and the reactive power. Active electricity is consumable while the reactive is not.

Sophisticated electrical and electronic home appliances have constantly pushing the power factor down forcing the generation system to supply relatively higher magnitude of reactive electricity, which is also pushing the generation capacity down to a large extent.

Approximately 30 per cent of the generated electricity is being disappeared from the system simply because of the low power factor.

The active and the reactive electricity are usually differentiated theoretically upon the kilovolt-Amp (KVA) in both generation and consumption stages utilizing power factor as the measuring unit.