338DISCUSSION ON THE PIMLICO DISTBIUJ! Discussion M r W. B. Noddings (Chief Commercial Officer, Central Electricity Authority) said that it was well known that very great difsculty and many problems arose in allocating the costs of a combined product; for example, what was the cost of wool and what was the cost of lamb? It was clear that the particular solution must depend on the particular circumstances. The Authors had dated that in Germany more than sixty different methods of cost allocation between electricity and heat supply had been used. TheAuthors deserved sympathy in having to make the diEcult choice between all the methods available, but he thought it would be agreed that in the solution which they had adopted they were certainly not biased in favour of electricity, and it might be said that they had erred, if a t all, in the direction of showing a very favourable charge to the heat supply. They had explained that in the hypothetical scheme for the ultimate development they had credited the kilowatt outpnt of the back-pressure plant with a full kilowatt charge, on the ground that in the case in question the accumulator permitted the operation of the station in such a way that the output of the station broadly followed the requirements of the electricity supply system. That was a very fair basis of assessment in the particular case considered, but there might be other cases of district heating where those circumstances would not apply and where the output fi-om a station might in summer be less than the appropriate proportion of the winter output which was required by the seasonal variation in the electricity requirements. In that case, of course, it would be appropriate to devalue the kilowatts. Many interesting figures were given in the Paper, and others could be derived from those given. It seemed that the overall efficiency of conversion-i.e., the energy supplied by way of electricity and heat related t o the heat input in the coal-was of the order of 80%. The corresponding figure if the two supplies, of electricity and heat, were derived independently, the one by electricity production in the normal way and the other by independent central heating, was about 55%. The figure of 27% had been given by the Authors for electricity production, and a figure of 60 to 65% might be taken for independent central heating.

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