India: worst power outage since the invention of electricity

[Surlethe]

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19060279

Hundreds of millions of people have been left without electricity in northern and eastern India after a massive power breakdown.

More than half the country has been left without power after three grids collapsed - one of them for the second day running.

Hundreds of trains have come to a standstill and hospitals are running on backup generators.

In eastern India, around 200 miners have been trapped underground.

They have been moved to an area where they have access to fresh air and are not in immediate danger.

In Delhi, Metro services were halted and staff evacuated trains. Some trains have started running again, although a full service is not expected for many hours.

The breakdowns in the northern, eastern, and north-eastern grids mean around 600m people have been affected.

A failure on the northern grid on Monday caused severe disruption and travel chaos across northern India.

The power minister said some states might have been taking too much electricity.

Addressing a news conference on Tuesday, the chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India told reporters that he anticipated power being restored by 19:00 (13:30GMT).

"Our message to people is that they are in safe hands, we have been in the job for years," RN Nayak said.

The exact cause of the power cut was unclear, he said, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".

"We have to see why there was a sudden increase in load... we will make sure that such a situation is not repeated," he said.

After Monday's cut, engineers managed to restore electricity to the northern grid by the evening, but at 13:05 (07:35 GMT) on Tuesday, it collapsed again.

The eastern grid failed around the same time, officials said, followed by the north-eastern grid.

Areas affected include Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east.

An official in Orissa said the blackout in the eastern grid had been triggered by a fault and could take several hours to resolve.

Railway officials said more than 350 trains were stranded.

India has one of the lowest per capita rates of consumption of power in the world ... this is nothing compared to say, Canada”

Across West Bengal, power went at 13:00 and all suburban railway trains on the eastern railways ground to a halt from Howrah and Seladah stations, the BBC's Rahul Tandon reports from Calcutta.

However, the city is not badly affected as it is served by a private electricity board, our correspondent adds.

Power cuts are common in Indian cities because of a fundamental shortage of power and an ageing grid - the chaos caused by such cuts has led to protests and unrest on the streets in the past.

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.

Correspondents say unless there is a huge investment in the power sector, the country will see many more power failures.

People-wise, that's like all of North America losing power. I wonder if this is the worst power outage since World War II.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yesterdays 350 million person blackout was already equal to the entire US... even if not everyone has electrical power and total power involved is far less, this new worse phase worse may well be the worst blackout ever. 350 million wasn't because the exact same thing had happened in India before.

[Sephirius]

So this is why our helpdesk is functioning better than usual.

[Mr Bean]

Six hundred and twenty million out of a billion and change population would be the equivalent of every single state in the Union minus California losing power for several hours. Meaning aside from hospitals and government buildings the entire country would be dark.

Still might freak some people out in the major cities to look out at a completely dead black city, but then they go outside and see that thing you only get in increasingly rare parts of the country.. the stars.

[Surlethe]

I really hope they got a satellite collage of the power out.

[Col. Crackpot]

Wow. Somebody really fucked up. Or a lot of people fucked up on many levels. These things have wide ranging effects outside the blackout zone as well. I was in Montreal during the big northeast blackout in 2003 and the Fairmout was having a bitch of a time checking people in and out of the hotel bcause the company servers were in Toronto, powerless. India must be utterly crippled.

[Haruko]

Japanese news station NHK Newsline interviewed Kamal Nath, Indian Urban Development Minister, today, and he said that India now considers urban infrastructure top priority, which is surprising to hear because an article in Future of the City, the latest issue of the Journal of International Affairs, showed that India has not been considering infrastructure a top priority unlike its eastern neighbor, China.

Also, the recent documentary Nero's Guests showed that the metropolises (23:00 minutes) get so much electricity at the expense of routine power cuts and growing electricity austerity for smaller cities and villages, which is a big deal since 53% of India is still small cities and rural areas compared to a mere 9% in China (JIA, p. 12). This point coincides with the one made today by German news station Deutsche Welle Journal, which was that the Federal Energy Minister said that the massive outage was caused by states drawing more energy than permitted.

Indian citizens know where the problem is, as evidenced for example when NHK interviewed a transport employee who ranted about how this is a government policy problem as fellow citizens nodded sagely in the background.

So this multiple, massive power failure may not have been inevitable, but it certainly was something that experts may have predicted with a fair level of confidence.

Hopefully this is a wake up call to Indian authorities on the higher and lower levels, systematically.

[Haruko]

Gah, wish I could still edit. Made a mistake. If 9% was rural that would be a much different world. I meant GDP growth, which was meant to support my assertion that India is not taking infrastructure seriously enough.

[Simon_Jester]

Six hundred and twenty million out of a billion and change population would be the equivalent of every single state in the Union minus California losing power for several hours. Meaning aside from hospitals and government buildings the entire country would be dark.

California does not contain 100 million people. You might want to recalculate.

Wow. Somebody really fucked up. Or a lot of people fucked up on many levels. These things have wide ranging effects outside the blackout zone as well. I was in Montreal during the big northeast blackout in 2003 and the Fairmout was having a bitch of a time checking people in and out of the hotel bcause the company servers were in Toronto, powerless. India must be utterly crippled.

The version I've heard- two things.

One, there are a lot of people running on unmetered connections to the power grid in India. So actual power consumption is larger than measured consumption. Which is bad if you're trying to predict demand and route power accordingly. Especially if a bunch of those people with bootleg connections start buying refrigerators or microwaves...

Two, local mismanagement of the grid may have been an issue. Politicians put pressure not to allow a rolling blackout in their city, engineers try to do too many things at once, and a local grid goes "snap crackle pop" as a result. Then you get cascading failures, a la the great Northeast blackouts of 1965 and 2003.

[Surlethe]

Two, local mismanagement of the grid may have been an issue. Politicians put pressure not to allow a rolling blackout in their city, engineers try to do too many things at once, and a local grid goes "snap crackle pop" as a result. Then you get cascading failures, a la the great Northeast blackouts of 1965 and 2003.

This was one factor I heard --- NYT quotes a former Indian power regulator:

"Surendra Rao, formerly India’s top electricity regulator, said the national grid had a sophisticated system of circuit breakers that should have prevented such a blackout. But he attributed this week’s problems to the bureaucrats who control the system, saying that civil servants are beholden to elected state leaders who demand that more power be diverted to their regions — even if doing so threatens the stability of the national grid. 'The dispatchers at both the state and the regional level should have cut off the customers who were overdrawing, and they didn’t,' Mr. Rao said. 'That has to be investigated.'"

[UnderAGreySky]

Surelethe is right: The grids collapsed due to the fact that two states (UP and Haryana more than any others) drew excess power. The one thing common to these two states is agriculture. This year, the monsoon has been poor and it's already time to sow the fields and water them, so farms across North India have been drawing water from wells.

Now, the state electricity boards don't have the balls to block the power as the farmers are a large voting block and there's a fair amount of corruption, so even though generating stations started shutting down due to a drop in frequency such areas weren't cut off from the grid. For the last decade or so our grids have been interconnected so that although power can be rerouted very well, it also means that the problems are shared too.

Hang on, this sounds a bit like the Euro crisis...

[Lonestar]

California does not contain 100 million people. You might want to recalculate.
.

I think he meant as a percentage of the population.

[Phantasee]

Power cuts are pretty common in India. Like the article says, big cities get power over smaller towns and villages as a matter of course. In many places, there's no power during the daylight hours, so the factories can run, with power being restored in time for the dark.

At least, that was the situation in 1996, and as recently as the early 2000s. I don't know if it's changed very much since then, though.

[UnderAGreySky]

Varies from state to state, Phantasee. For instance in my state, different districts have a different weekly day off; this allows loads to be staggered a bit - at least one-seventh less than it would be. Many large industrial areas use local diesel generators too, made by the same companies that make ship engines.

[Simon_Jester]

California does not contain 100 million people. You might want to recalculate.
.

I think he meant as a percentage of the population.

I think so too; that's why he needs to recalculate.

"Every state except California" is 85-90% of the US population.

"700 million Indians" is not 85-90% of the Indian population.

[Sea Skimmer]

One, there are a lot of people running on unmetered connections to the power grid in India. So actual power consumption is larger than measured consumption. Which is bad if you're trying to predict demand and route power accordingly. Especially if a bunch of those people with bootleg connections start buying refrigerators or microwaves...

That doesn't really matter directly, they know what people are using from how much power the generating stations produce and how much flows through all the substations before voltage drop or frequency problems kick in. Additionally measuring consumption at the point of use meter is not completely accurate, because it does not account for transmission losses that vary depending on the configuration of the grid at that moment and weather conditions. When you get close to grid collapse your transmission losses tend to rise as power is moved longer and longer distances and in cases like this a half percent extra transmission loss is all it will take to start overloading stuff further up the wire. Power theft is a problem, but mainly because it starves the electrical grid of long term funding.

[Mr Bean]

California does not contain 100 million people. You might want to recalculate.
.

I think he meant as a percentage of the population.

I think so too; that's why he needs to recalculate.

"Every state except California" is 85-90% of the US population.

"700 million Indians" is not 85-90% of the Indian population.

Lonestar is correct and Simon Jester is also correct, my memory of the size of California's population was off (I remember it being closer to fifty million not thirty seven million). So lets just say if 40 out of the 50 states were without power as a comparison as the top ten states have 50% of the population.

[Phantasee]

Varies from state to state, Phantasee. For instance in my state, different districts have a different weekly day off; this allows loads to be staggered a bit - at least one-seventh less than it would be. Many large industrial areas use local diesel generators too, made by the same companies that make ship engines.

Which state are you from? I've only visited Punjab and Orissa, with stops in Delhi and Bombay. Orissa, from what I recall, didn't have the same power problems as the villages of Punjab, but I stayed in a metropolitan area IIRC (I was in grade three, I can't remember it all).

[UnderAGreySky]

Maharashtra (Bombay). Generally the power here is managed better than other states but it is a matter of degree. Bombay itself is "islanded" to guarantee supply - other grids are cut off if they demand more than what is spare after supplying Bombay city.

Orissa is not as dependent on the rain and climate as the North since its income is split between farming and fisheries.