of manufactured-gas development must stand or fall. This measures the difference between ultimate success or inevitable failure.

Merely providing for the three groups of expenditures in the preceding section will not yield any profit. Without a fair profit there is no incentive for improvement. Without improvement there can be no progress or development. Therefore inducing profit is fundamentally necessary to continuously and permanently stimulate development of more efficient utilization methods of our fuel resources and extension of public-utility service.



Many published data purporting to show the cost, especially the so-called holder cost – that is, the cost of gas delivered into the holder – or burner cost – that is, the cost of gas delivered at the consumer's burners – of manufactured gas includes only the element (a) of the above analysis. That is, provisions (b) and ( c) were omitted with the result that many cost figures given are not correct.



The rental for the use of the money, provision to ultimately pay the money invested, taxes, insurance, replacements, and repairs due to age or weather conditions, and some of the executive charges are fixed and go on for each of the 8,760 hours of the year and are entirely independent of the volume of the manufactured-gas enterprise's business. Of the total money paid by the public more than one-half must go to meet this fixed-charge situation.
 
Failure to appreciate the significance of this has been responsible for many manufactured-gas financial difficulties and inability to carry out fuel-conservation measures from the viewpoint of economics. The economic and not the engineering features are, for this reason, ultimately controlling all the fuel-conservation projects.



Wide variation in the range of seasonal, daily, and hourly fuel needs are the dominating features of house heating. Atmospheric temperature will determine the consumer's needs and each degree drop in temperature will increase the consumer's demand for heating, as shown in Figure 10.

The consumer will not contract to take a specific amount of gas at a definite time but will expect to get all the gas he needs and to use it as he needs it. Manufactured-gas service for house heating must, therefore, cope with the varying demand, meet the peak-load


 



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