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Half of India Without Electricity As Power Grid Crisis Deepens
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that a massive power breakdown has hit India for a second day running, leaving more than half the country without power as the northern and eastern grids have both collapsed. The breakdown has hit a large swathe of the country including Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan states in the north, and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east. Power cuts are a common occurrence in Indian cities because of a fundamental shortage of power and an aging grid. The chaos caused by such cuts has led to protests and unrest on the streets but the collapse of an entire grid is rare — the last time the northern grid failed was in 2001. India's demand for electricity has soared in recent years as its economy has grown but its power infrastructure has been unable to meet the growing needs. In the weeks leading up to the failure, extreme heat had caused power use to reach record levels in New Delhi and on July 30 a line feeding into the Agra-Bareilly transmission section, the 400-kV Bina-Gwalior line, tripped, triggering the collapse. The second grid collapse occurred on 31 July as the Northern, Eastern and North-Eastern power grids of India tripped/failed causing power blackout in 19 states across India. The crisis was allegedly triggered after four states — Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and UP — drew much more than their assigned share of power."
It's not all or nothing. If a lot of people had some form of distributed power it would mean less has to be produced at a central location and then transmitted for long distances, thus easing the burden on the ageing infrastructure.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
It goes to show how "developed" India is, when it actually has a sewage crisis, water crisis and now this.
Kolkata's sewage system is literally collapsing in on itself.
The modern India we see on TV is held up by the rickety old infrastructure dating back to colonial times.
India needs to stop funneling their money from into their pockets and back into the streets.
They can be light years ahead of neighboring countries if they concentrate their efforts into massive public works projects.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Doctor Matt seems to have created his account very recently. He also seems to have found and be very excited by an awful lot of things that Microsoft Research have been saying. One or two of these things are even relevant to this thread.
Not that I wish to suggest anything but... perhaps Doctor Matt might wish to consider whether he has any particular relationships with Microsoft that might usefully be disclosed? :)
It will actually be interesting to hear if any call centers that claimed Serious Redundancy And Stuff were a tad... optimistic... and will find customers going elsewhere in the near future.
It's not like backup power is total rocket surgery; but things that cost money all the time and only prove useful occasionally have a nasty habit of being neglected...
Excluding externalized costs, yet, including them, no. Economics always sides with dumping the problem on someone else, that is, until that some one else gets angry enough to do something very uneconomical about it.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
The US's infrastructure is not all latest, greatest, state of the art, but then nowhere is (since it is stuff you put in to last) but it is way ahead of India. The problem I think is people hear stories about US infrastructure problems, because there are, and because we want to look out and identify problems before they become a crisis. However that doesn't equate to the same kind of problems that India has.
As a good example: India has daily blackouts in much of the nation (seriously, you can see another post in this thread on it and it isn't hard to find more info). This isn't something new, or something that happens only occasionally, this is part of regular life.
I really think that the people who live in the US and like to hate on how bad it is need to do some traveling. Not to tourist hotspots, but to regular cities and villages in foreign countries. See how people live the world over. It can give you more appreciation for just how good we have it. Things are not perfect in the US, far from it, but that doesn't mean that everything is shit, as many people seem to believe.
Yeah. Americans need to take a good look. This is the United States in a few years if the power companies have their way. Want to know why they're so heavily behind forced conservation measures? It's because our power grid is aging, and is not growing at a rate that keeps up with the growth of demand. Worse, instead of improving it as a nonprofit or government-owned utility would, they're giving excess profits to their stockholders while pressuring everyone to do stupid hacks like adding emergency cutoffs on air conditioning so they can let your house hit a hundred degrees to save power, forcing everyone to use those crappy CFL bulbs, paying people to replace their old refrigerators, and other temporary bandaids that merely delay the inevitable, but don't really solve the problem.
What this proves is that for-profit corporations simply cannot be trusted to maintain such a critical resource. Their natural tendency is to operate on razor-thin margins to turn maximum profit. When they screw up, the government ends up declaring a state of emergency and paying for the losses, so having that infrastructure in private hands is basically nothing more than government subsidizing a bunch of wealthy fat cats on Wall Street. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of paying Wall Street billionaires, the government instead spent that money to actually improve the power grid?
We need to convince the U.S. government that this is an important problem to solve now, before we have more widespread blackouts that take out a huge swath of the U.S. like the one last September in southern California, Arizona, and parts of Mexico. The only way that's going to happen is if our government steps up to the plate and builds a government-owned and government-managed power infrastructure. What we need is the nationwide equivalent of TVA, but with a network of modern, superconducting power lines crisscrossing the country.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And I DARE a pussy like you to come and confront me.... 45cal to the chest will change your mind. "I was scared for my life! he came after me into my yard!"
My god, what trash. Only trash talks big like that.