Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Dell Technical Support could not be reached for comments."
Saw an interesting and partially-related piece yesterday about scheduled and unscheduled power-outages in neighbouring Pakistan and the social unrest that can result from them.
We all know the old adage about a civilised society being just three missed meals away from barbarism. In the modern world, I wonder whether something similar could be said for the power supply. And might broadband ever fall into the same camp?
Is this another example of "all or nothing" attitude?
I use a bit of solar on my own house and I wish that I had a way to put up a wind turbine. They are great supplementary forms of power, but it seems like the attitude is that if they aren't perfect then they are worthless.
Unless the wind decides to take a nap right about the moment when the sun tries to burn people to a crisp. You know, the reason you have to turn on air conditioning in the first place, because there's no wind to cool shit down.
Wind power is a nice bonus but I wouldn't rely on it powering anything of importance.
Localized LFTR reactors, on the other hand...
Just great. Now how am I supposed to get my cell phone bill corrected?
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!
Guess this means that HP and Compaq's phone in help desks are down.
your chances of getting an english speaking representative who's name isn't either Jay or Mike.
I know that the people making the big bucks will just take the hit in customer satisfaction over this blackout, but maybe it will make them realize you can't offshore everything.
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!
So your reactor no one has built and used is ok for important stuff but well developed and currently in use wind power is too much of a gamble for important uses?
I think we can all feel free to ignore your opinions on this topic based on that kind of nonsense.
No, really... the network is fine, and constantly being brought up to the state of the art. The real problem is the rapid increase in demand, caused by households with multiple light bulbs. The utility company plans to remedy the problem by putting special meters on the highest-usage households, that will shut off their electrical supply if they use more than 15 kilowatt-hours per month.
For an additional fee, the customers may switch to the "unlimited" plan, which will cut them off after 30 kWh.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This argument also counts for developed countries in a lot of cases as well:
Power is a commodity. This makes the cheapest provider of it the winner. Current technologies are such that coal is still (often by far) the cheapest source of power. In addition it is one of the few base-load options out there (others being biofuel, nuclear, hydoelectric). With these two features of coal, wind is often times too expensive an option for a country such as India and with an aging grid, the power fluctuations from other sources like wind and solar will often overwhelm the infrastructure.
Technology adoption is rarely the only barrier to a solution. Cost plays a major role and when you're subsistence-living you don't give a shit about whether coal will pollute your environment because you're more worried about where your next meal will come from.
Some will also argue that local power like wind requires less infrastructure. This isn't entirely true. You still need to run the wires from the local power station to the residences. You can save on long-distance transmission lines but considering you need those anyways for the base-load... that's a bit of a non argument.
In general, solar, wind etc are first world solutions where we have the option of paying a bit more to make up for the difference in costs involved in producing the cleaner and more local power and even then... these projects have a pretty high fail rate (Solar fields in Spain, Wind farms in Hawai'i).
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Guess this means that HP and Compaq's phone in help desks are down.
And every other company that has off-shored offices over there. And I hope all the software developers over there are also in the dark and all the US based companies that sent their stuff over there are squirming and bleeding money over this.
And I hope this makes all their projects late so that when the customer says, "Hey IBM (or whoever), why is our project late?! You now owe us $Big Bucks in performance penalties!"
IBM: "It's not our fault! It's India's!"
"Our super top secret project that will make us the top dog in our industry is being developed in India?! With no way to check if our trade secrets are going out the door!?"
*Terrified Silence*
I can dream, can't I?
Wind and solar are fine as supplements in areas where you have room for panels and turbines. But I don't see them being a big help in densely-packed areas like India and Japan. For those areas you would still need to build plants far from the city, and that still means you need decent infrastructure.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
My 'perfect' carbon neutral electricity source is 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% hydro/geo/other.
20% solar is a 'perfect' fit for the average 50% increase in power demand during the day. 1.5(day) + 1(night) = 2.5 * 20% = .5. 40% nuclear gives you a good amount of stability, while the 20% wind doesn't make you strain too much if power demand happens to increase when the wind isn't blowing ideally. The remaining 20% is for peaking capability(which hydro is good at), and niche electrical providers where they're just the best answer for that spot.
Best yet, since you have a variety of sources, you're nicely diversified and not likely to be as screwed by unusual situations.
I don't read AC A human right
Background:
I'm an Indian, presently in Gurgaon (within National Capital Region) and yes, there has been a blackout since past few hours.
As to homes and office, situation is not so bad because blackouts are such an everyday occurrence that diesel generators in apartment complexes and offices are *very* common. The immediate real effects are to infrastructure i.e. Railways and Delhi Metro (mass transport).
Now to address the system, a good reading : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India
relevant parts from first paragraph:
The per capita average annual domestic electricity consumption in India in 2009 was 96 kWh in rural areas and 288 kWh in urban areas for those with access to electricity, in contrast to the worldwide per capita annual average of 2600 kWh and 6200 kWh in the European Union. India's total domestic, agricultural and industrial per capita energy consumption estimate vary depending on the source. Two sources place it between 400 to 700 kWh in 2008–2009. As of January 2012, one report found the per capita total consumption in India to be 778 kWh.
India currently suffers from a major shortage of electricity generation capacity, even though it is the world's fourth largest energy consumer after United States, China and Russia. The International Energy Agency estimates India needs an investment of at least $135 billion to provide universal access of electricity to its population.
India's electricity sector is amongst the world's most active players in renewable energy utilization, especially wind energy. As of December 2011, India had an installed capacity of about 22.4 GW of renewal technologies-based electricity, exceeding the total installed electricity capacity in Austria by all technologies.
We do have a major problem on our hands.
1. Demand *far* outstrips supply.
2. Distribution losses are high. Illegal tapping, faulty meters, old equipment and corruption being leading causes.
3. Free/cheap electricity provided to agriculture sector and collection of dues waived due to vote-bank politics.
But we are working on it:
1. Looking into renewable energy like wind and hydro in a major way. (see quote above and wiki)
2. Major investment into Nuclear energy.
Environmental groups are slowing down development of the above though.
The media is giving a lot of hype to this .. and half the nation is a big number and and grid is a big thing so i guess its important .. but India always had power shortage ..Bangalore used to have 6 hours load shedding in summers every day in city and 12 hours in rural .. but life just moves on .. it never really mattered .. almost every apartment has backup power generators and same with corporate offices as power is not so reliable .. and for others who dont have backup its not critical and no power means slight inconvenience .. nothing comes to standstill .. not even traffic light breakdown .. really those never worked and no one followed them anyways .. India is like that .. i am not proud of this and i am an indian .. i am just telling its no big deal .. and regarding the uprising this .. unless its on the final over of world cup india is wining .. no chance .. we are peaceful creatures ..
I've also heard that warm air (caused by your body temp, for example) tends to create a very thin insulating layer on the surface of your skin. The movement of air breaks up the insulating layer, allowing more heat to escape.
1. You will need certificates. No matter what you do. Anything you do must have an application, usually in triplicate, and it should be accompanied by certificates. Tons and tons of certificates.
2. All these certificates must be obtained by bribing some official or another.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yup even a paltry 100watt panel on every home with a syncing mini inverter would make a huge dent in loads. and they are not stuck with overzealous UA requirements so they can use the inexpensive China syncing inverters that are 250 watt max that gives the ability to expand to 2 100 watt panels per home.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Taking that a step further, there are a lot of appliances in a house that don't take that much wattage. A 400-500 watt solar panel system, a MPPT controller [1], a bank of deep-cycle AGM batteries, and a decent inverter could keep low wattage appliances going, such as electric shavers, smartphone chargers, laptop chargers, perhaps a TV or audio system.
There are a lot of RV boondockers who can run their whole rig, everything but the air conditioner, microwave, and engine with a similar setup.
Of course, the higher current appliances will still need grid access, such as the washer and dryer, dishwasher, electric stove, HVAC system, but it will help deal with the low draw items.
Since most chargers use small amounts of current even when nothing is plugged in or the device is fully charged, it wouldn't hurt to have them on their own circuit that is off a battery bank and not on the grid. As a bonus, with a good PSW inverter, even if there are surges and spikes from the power grid, those items wouldn't be affected.
[1]: Yes, a MPPT controller is more expensive than a PWM controller, but you can use higher voltage solar panels which helps with electricity loss over the wires. It also helps ensure the best charging voltage for the battery bank.
Solar panels are abundant throughout Udaipur, a city in the affected state of Rajasthan. Rooftops are scattered with them here but I don't know or believe the rest of the country has them as widely installed.
Wind power does not work for base line power. It is inherently unstable and unreliable. The speed of wind changes all the time, turbines are easily damaged by storms, and large calm periods are not infrequent. A nuclear powered heat engine IS fundamentally stable, reliable, and impervious to all but the worst man made or natural disasters. I am not suggesting there is no place for wind power. I am suggesting that there is no place for wind power in establishing a base line level of power. Wind is fine as a supplement, and very useful for use in stored energy applications where reliability is aggregated over time. For base line power production, nuclear and solar are the cleanest, safest, most reliable, most stable power plants available.
If an object is hotter than it's surroundings in still air a volume of air arround it will start to heat up reducing the rate of heat transfer. Similarlly if a wet object is in still air a volume of air arround it will increase in humidity reducing the rate of evaporation. Moving air means the air has moved away from the hot/moist object before it has a chance to increase in tempreature or humidity much.
In cool climates the temperature is lower than body temperature so both heat transfer and evaporation will be working to cool your body.
In a hot climate though the direct heat transfer will be warming the body and the only cooling from the wind will be through evaporation.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
When I first got to China in 2004, summer blackouts were just part of life. From 10am until 4pm, the power at my apartment just went off. I had to go find a cafe or something and sit around until the heat of the day had passed and the power came back on. It only happened sometimes, not every day. I found out later that there was a schedule for such things, but I couldn't read Chinese back then so there was no way for me to know. I haven't been in a residential blackout for years now. Obviously, things have gotten better. A big nuclear plant went online near here a few years back and I'm sure that ended the power problem permanently. It must be nice having your society run by scientists and engineers, and treating the environuts as the Luddites that they are.
Factories were on a schedule of blackouts, too. There was not enough power to go around, so one or two days per week there would be no electricity. This delayed production and caused all kinds of problems, particularly when the factory failed to inform the customer that this was the case. Factories could get diesel generators to pick up the slack, but generally the factory owners were too cheap to invest in this sort of thing.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Firstly, I hope you are not equating wind and solar with small-scale. Very large wind and solar projects are possible with today's technology. See European offshore wind development. See various Sahara solar project plans.
Secondly, the potential for large, grid scale storage has not even begun to be tapped. e.g. Underwater airbags, molten salt storage, etc etc etc not to mention the flexibility of small-scale Lithium-chemistry batteries or sodium-chemistry batteries added to the local electricity distribution system.
Thirdly, low-loss high-voltage DC transmission, and probably in the near future long-distance superconducting transmission lines, have the potential to completely change the use cases for non-dispatchable intermittent renewable generation, allowing power to be switched around an entire continent from where the generation is high to where the load is high.
Fourthly, we have not started to take advantage of "negawatt" generators; large scale pooled demand response technology.
All these things together, with bi-directional power flow the norm, and energy hubs instead of conventional substations, will lead to a much higher potential use for distributed and intermittent renewable energy sources. The technology building blocks are either here already, or within a decade of production usability, so it would be best to start right now changing the plans and assumptions, and, with carbon taxes, the economic incentives, to accommodate these new green and more stochastically reliable power technologies.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You use the basic laws of thermodynamics. Take a gas that can be easily compressed into a liquid through a narrowing of a pipe. When this happens, heat is given off, then the now liquid gas becomes cool and is pumped into the freezer compartment. Then the liquid absorbs heat from the freezer, cooling the freezer and heating the liquid. After passing through the cooling circuit, it is released into wider pipes where the liquid expands back into a gas and cools down. The cycle then repeats.
In the modern apartments of India, an Indian family is going to have the TV, DVD player, satellite dish, dish-washer, fridge, freezer, air-conditioners in the living room, bedrooms and kitchen, cooker, microwave, steamer, electric garage door and gates. They are even going to have power-pumps for the cold water supply to ensure they get their fair share of the water supply. The most critical are the cooker and washing/machines. Both of those on together will top 9 Kilowatts (We know, because our old house had a 9 Kilowatt trip switch, and it would trip right when these items were on, along with a TV and several laptops). Add a few air-conditioners on permanently and that goes over 15 Kilowatts. Add a water mains power-pump (because everyone else has one, and if you don't, you don't get any water), and that would go over 20 Kilowatts. Multiply that by several hundred million, and you've got massive demand in the Gigawatt range. Well beyond what the grid was designed for.
In the past, the solution to blackouts was simply to redirect the energy to whoever was complaining at the time.
Some people were getting so fed up, they were hiring the transgender community to party and dance outside the home of the electricity board's CEO at 2am in the morning. If they weren't going to get any sleep, neither was he.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I have a Generator that can power my computer and house and a decent UPS that can run my system without any issues. To reach this point I have been through hell. In Pakistan the power crisis has only gone worse each year. I can't remember the last day when the power didn't go out. Every day it goes out for 8 hours or more. It's literally a hell hole for online business. I have trained myself to work in harsh conditions in the past which included running the computer and keeping the fan off (40+C temperatures) and before that I would usually shutdown the PC before the power went out. I literally memorized the power schedule and I would constantly keep working and then powering off and then coming back to work. That routine was amazingly harsh; you were put under a lot of stress physically and emotionally. Now, even with this backup solution you still get pwned because the gas prices are high here and if you venture outside you will just roast yourself. In short, India is just facing a major blackout just now but Pakistan has been facing this for years now.
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