India Blackout(s)

N

Thread Starter

nic

Does anyone working in India have any information on the blackouts? I follow stuff that goes on in the US power grid, but am curious if anyone in India can shed light on the events that have occurred over the past couple of days... the newspaper and internet articles aren't very satisfying.
 
I did see on the CNN website, that a possible cause is that the rainfall (it is monsoon season there) is down by 20%. Farmers are irrigating more and since it is so hot more people are using AC than normal. Just possible contributing factors...
 
Z

Zacharia, Tomy

There is an old Indian (in Asia) saying which loosely translated means that "One should add more to the pot than one takes out". This is more-or-less the problem with the Indian Electricity Grid. Everybody wants electricity and assumes that the "Infinite Grid" somehow magically will produce the same but nobody wants to pay for electricity and consequently new power plants and distribution grids.

India depends a lot on the monsoons for irrigation and this year monsoons are playing cruel tricks. This is nothing new. But for the jugglery of our Grid controllers, blackouts would have been an everyday occurrence. Thus the main outcome of Grid Discipline would be that everybody would be equally miserable and the misery would not be restricted to the ones not contributing to Grid stability.

Everybody was overdrawing power. The biggest consumers were the biggest over-drawers, about 25% above quota. Thus the candle light dinners and lunches and everything else.

The situation has been developing over decades. Every politician wants to be the highest donor of free electricity to the farming sector.

Hopefully something will change this time and result in extra power generation and distribution. And the consumers will start paying for power.

(That was one cynical rant).

Regards,
Tomy Zacharia
 
R

Rahul P Sharma

Could be that the government is trying to build a case for Nuclear Power..... India signed a Nuclear deal with USA during President Bush's Visit towards the end of his presidency.... There was an intense debate over the advantages and disadvantages of Nuclear deal...!! Common Indians supported it whole heartedly....!! They still do....!! But for the Nuclear Activists who have stalled a couple of Mega Projects in South India currently underway....!! Overall, no system that draws much more than it produces can sustain, as Tomy Zacharia pointed out....!!!

au revoir
Rahul
 
Excellent explanation, Tomy Zacharia.

There have been several excellent reports on the BBC about the problems contributing to the blackouts in India. I especially liked the explanation of "leakage" which has been estimated at between 2% and 10% of load, sometimes more.

Another interesting statistic: approximately 10% of the world's population was without power during the worst outage.

It's a very difficult dilemma. It seems politics and electricity mix about as well as fire and water.

Thanks again, Tomy Zacharia!
 
The reason for the blackout has not yet evolved!! Few theories of overdrawing of power have been doing the rounds!! The truth seems to be overloading of a transmission line which was not promptly tended to. This happened because another transmission line between the same grid was taken down for upgradation and the existing line was overloaded (nearly 65% overloading). A little more shrewdness from the LDC could have averted the black out.

Still, there has been no official word on it-but this seems convincing!! But, there is no denying the fact that pot has more hands than the food in it.
 
Top