Sympathy for India: power outage

This makes the '03 Northeast power outage look like a blip. The radio this morning said there are now 600 million out of power.

Unless the utilities start getting their butts in gear and upgrading the US transmission infrastructure, we can start looking at this happening here--and soon!

 

News stories noted that the transmission system wastes 50% of the electricity with corruption, incompetence and theft being the problem. Kind of like letting Wall St run your utilities.

 

don't you mean 50-95%?

 

Some facts seem to be emerging from the Indian black outs. 640 million people, about 9% of the worlds population was affected.

Part of the reason it was so widespread is the grids were connected, and some of these connections were being repaired, leading to overloads in other connections. This is a reason why it was so widespread, but not why the first black out happened.

India seems to have some sever regulatory problems, and electric demand has grown faster than supply. This situation is set up by regulators keeping prices lower for electricity than it costs to add new supplies or even keep the ones around running. California had similar regulatory bias during their black outs in 2000. India power comes a great deal from coal, but with higher coal prices, many power plants were not running at full power because india didn't have high enough coal supplies. Most coal comes from a state monopoly. The droughts caused a short fall of hydro power, while at the same time increasing demand for electricity for farmers to pump water to irrigate crops. I read that these irrigation pumps run on free electricity, so there is no incentive to conserve or make them efficient.

 

There’s also a running debate about whether India would be better off investing in less centralized forms of electricity. Reuters recently profiled a remote Indian village, Meerwanda, that sits independent of the national grid, harnessing solar panels to generate its electricity. One tantalizing possibility is that more and more villages could generate their own power, without relying on the government to string up wires. Yet solar power will still account for just 1 percent of the country’s electricity by 2022.

 

Smaller grids make sense. Getting a large proportion from solar is a little crazy. One reason for the grid crashes was the cheap electricity prices fixed by the government. How do you expect them to have a reliable network of solar installed, with I assume battery back ups and many times the cost they can charge customers.

The least expensive solar is grid tied solar That is rather obvious. The grid suffers from under investment. Diverting the money to solar will only make it worse.

Meerwanda had its solar paid for by SunEdison. These types of installations are not economic for the 300 million Indians not connected to the grid. Off-grid power shines in India's solar village| Reuters

The system cost about a years income for the village. No village is going to pay that much on their own.



Tata Motors paid to put up its own grid. Ambani, Tata ‘Islands’ Shrug Off Grid Collapse: Corporate India - Businessweek

Its sad instead of paying into the system, these companies have had to build their own little grids. The reason is compelling though.

 

Those crazy Germans.

Or is it those crazy Indians?

 

Read in the latest IEEE spectrum - Indias' massive outage cause by lack of rain. Farmers are drilling deeper to get water, causing an overload on the grid, using more power to run the drills. Also their infastructure leaves a lot to be desired. Redundacy does not seem to be the norm over there, especially with a booming population.

DBCassidy

 

I don't understand how they could have a problem.


I took that picture 3 years ago on a rickshaw ride through the old part of Deli. Our guide said that if a circuit goes out they will often string new wire while leaving the old wire up because it's too hard to troubleshoot that rats nest of wire.

 

Thank you very much for responding. I have heard from an ex-coworker who happened to go to India. He was shocked to see, pretty much in your picture, the distribution of power from one community to another.

DBCassidy

 

I admire the people at the worker bee level that make things work in that environment, or in any third world country. Their systems may suck but there are some amazingly capable people that seem to be able to do almost anything with nothing. I saw a barefoot lineman working on a steel power pole in another town.

 

If you look at China versus India, both rapidly evolving their grids, China's grid wastes about 20% less energy. That is a huge amount. Those worker bees are doing this bad job, because the utilities and government have been failing them for the last 5 decades. Worse the electricity minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, got promoted the day after the black outs. Getting hundreds of millions of people on a efficient grid is something only the government can do.