Geographia Polonica (1975) vol. 32

The power industry infrastructure in physical planning

Czesław Mejro

Geographia Polonica (1975) vol. 32, pp. 53-62 | Full text

The fuel and power economy has become so popular in recent years, espe-cially in view of the world crisis of energy, that there is no need to give the reasons for the significance of power industry all over the world.There are bilateral relations between the national economy development and the development of widely understood power industry: on the one hand indus-try, transportation, agriculture, and household demands for fuel and energy sti-mulate the growth of power plants and systems, and on the other hand, both the amount of power supplied to the end-users and power quality and forms affect technology development, economy development, labour productivity, and stand-ard of living to a great extent.The appropriate furnishing of the nation with power industry facilities, or power industry infrastructure, has become one of more important factors of physical planning under these conditions. Interacting relations can also be seen in this case: on the one hand, the physical planning game is the basis of the planning and designing of power industry systems, on the other hand, the im-plementation of flexible power systems and availability of energy nearly all - over the country can facilitate the physical planning, enable the centralization of industry, equalize the standard of people's living, etc.However, fuel winning and energy conversion, transmission and utilization pose new economical, technical, sociological, ecological, and other problems.The uncontrolled environmental side effects of energy utilization becomes more and more alarming; there is a little doubt that these effects will be more and more significant.Such countries as Poland, whose power economy relies on coal, encounter a particularly difficult task; and this is especially true if the available coal con-tains sulphur compounds whose economical removal from fuel itself or fuel ga-ses has not been successful yet.

Czesław Mejro, Technical University, Warsaw