WHAT IS LOAD SHEDDING AND ITS CAUSES

What is load shedding? and what is meant by load shedding? and what are its causes? These are the questions many of the electrical engineers and common people will have.

As the name indicates shedding means "removing something". Here we are shedding the load which means we are removing the load from the grid. Usually load shedding is done, when there is huge demand for electricity and the generation of power is much lesser when compared to the load.Generally in summer load increases as many of the consumers use air conditioners.Therefore in summer there are possibilities of power cut to a greater extent.

To make it very simple let us take this example.Say there are 12 customers who wants to use taxis in morning,afternoon and evening session.But we have only 8 taxis.So what we do is ,make the 8 taxis available to 8 persons at a time and send the taxis to the next 4 customers after 1 hour. Similarly we make the other set of 4 customers to wait in the afternoon session and next set in the evening session.All the three set of customers get late by 1 hour.All of them have same waiting period but in different sessions.

Presently the situation is same in Tamil Nadu.In major cities the power cut is for 2 hours and in town areas it is more than 8 hours but at different timings.This is done because the generation is much lesser than the demand.The government needs to build the new generation plants.Nuclear power plant has been built  in Kudankulam and the state government has demanded the central government to donate all the power generated from Kudankulam power plant to Tamil Nadu.

How can we reduce the load shedding from our side?It is as simple as that,reduce all the unwanted loads.Switch off your computers when you are not using.You may think it just a small unit which is going to be consumed,but behind that there is generation,transmission and distribution and it involves huge cost which can be avoided.Switch off lights,fans,televisions when you don't need it.Reduce the usage of air conditioners in winter.Avoid using lifts and escalators at times.