5 ms·

Another power failure in India

63 points by gauravsc 14y ago

pradeep89 14y ago
What a shame ! Useless government !!! It affected ATMS, TRAINS , more than 30% indian population affected by this outage crisis
- gauravsc 14y ago
  This government is totally useless, ineffective, arrogant and insensitive.
- kleim 14y ago
  And you forgot the 70% of unavailable call centers in the US!
mqzaidi 14y ago
It started at midday and there are already such scenes, I wonder what will happen during peak commute times. Note that the first area to have power restored is NDMC, which houses top politicians and bureaucrats.
- gauravsc 14y ago
  The best part is that they have decided to promote the Power Minister Sushil Shinde as the Home Minister, now all the terrorist will die rolling on the floor laughing.
nsns 14y ago
As far as I know, Indians are more prepared for such failures than most people. Every (middle class) Indian house I know has batteries or a generator because of the daily load shedding. Such failures somewhat complicate the commendable struggles against new nuclear plants and dams (e.g., http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2803/stories/20110211280309000.htm http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2803/stories/201102112803090...)
- gauravsc 14y ago
  Even Indians are not used to such large scale load shedding, where almost half of the country is without power.
  - iamgopal 14y ago
    faith my friend, they will get used to. "Getting used to" is the art every Indian has mastered.
kamaal 14y ago
In short the reasons for failures are something like this. a. No proper control systems/automation to detect and prevent overload/tripping in case of excessive power consumption by any particular state. b. No back up/redundancy planning. c. The grid architecture is badly designed, and leads to cascading failures of sub grids. d. Low quality equipment which fails often. India's energy infrastructure is ancient. Its patch work for overgrown villages(Read cities) totally incapable of meeting any sort of dependable demands. Add to this massive bureaucracy, license raj and corruption in purchase of equipment in electricity boards. They buy low quality equipment which fails often(because they are bribed to do so), since equipment fails often they buy more. The state of affairs is so bad, transformers fail and burst even if rains a little heavily. What follows next is hours together of effort installing and fixing new transformers. This is a common scenario in many areas in a city like Bangalore. This is apart for hours together scale of unscheduled load shedding which is frequent. On top of this there are frequent protests and lobbying to stop the construction of power plants(Hydel/Nuclear or otherwise). And these are all state controlled monopolies. Recently I heard, Electricity board in Bangalore is complaining against builders of gated communities(Flats and Villas) and forcing them to use Govt supplied equipment. Because the private builders are using better quality equipment which is exposing and is making the Govt board look bad in front of them. Any attempt to correct this system is met by massive political hostility. And people proposing modern changes are perceived as anti-Indian culture capitalist stooges being used by companies in the west to sell their equipment.
- intended 14y ago
  Would love to know why you say what you do. Do you work in the field? I just switched over to a firm in the power generator sector in India, and the Govt Contracts for power are beasts. Those are things which we make sure we go over every page to fulfill. They are also not that archaic - their backup/redundancy planning exists, at least on paper. We've supplied it for various institutions/bodies. Plus the Engineers in BHEL and the like are pretty smart chaps, sure they may be slow but they are far from being daft. (Again! My experience, and mileage will vary) Not sure about how bad the architecture is, or how badly designed it is either. From what I recall quality levels are a patchwork. As I assume are equipment quality levels. I'm not well versed in this, so I'm more interested in learning, whats going on.
intended 14y ago
Well hopefully this will happen for a few more days, and that will galvanize people enough to get someone to deal with the rampant power theft, and terrible power gen vs demand ratio.
- kamaal 14y ago
  Talking of power theft. Slums steal massive amounts of power without paying a rupee. Also same with street side functions, processions and religious events. Everybody feels they have freedom to steal. No wonder corruption is so difficult to eliminate in this country.
  - intended 14y ago
    I'm usually very hesitant when it comes to discussions on corruption in the country. Corruption carries the burden of many meanings in it and so its very easy to get caught up talking past other people. For one there are several different types of corruption, I usually treat them as small c corruption and Big C "Corruption". A break down for Small C corruption for Bangalore between June July can be got here - from ipaidabribe: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=413057582064179&set=a.139512526085354.12957.138552116181395&type=1&relevant_count=1 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=413057582064179&s... (for some reason their site doesn't have the photo, so had to dig up their Facebook page) Then there is large 'Corruption', the purvey of our politicians which has to be treated differently. Thats what we need the Lokpal bill for. The new changes to service tax though, will slowly close many of the loop holes though.
  - luser001 14y ago
    Wrt the conventional wisdom that "Slums steal massive amounts of power without paying a rupee". Frontline magazine did a study which showed that a huge amount of power theft was occuring at industrial consumers. http://www.flonnet.com/fl1906/19060950.htm http://www.flonnet.com/fl1906/19060950.htm (it's a little dry in the typical Frontline style. I hope you will read it). Also, you didn't mention businesses in places in Chandni Chowk, Lajpat Nagar etc? Given the other "cost-cutting"^Wtax-evading measures they take, I would feel very confident in assuming that they don't pay for most of their energy use.
sirfried 14y ago
Incredible India
mjn 14y ago
If Wikipedia isn't missing any, it looks like these are now the two largest blackouts in history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#Largest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#Largest
pm90 14y ago
I'm appalled at the no. of comments that say "the govt. is useless/shit and that the system is torn by corruption". Of course it is. More constructive comments, please!
lenkite 14y ago
Let's face reality - we have a power crisis and political sops to greedy states only exacerbate this. We were supposed to have several nuclear reactors functional and giving power to regional grids by 2012. Thanks to the 'green' brigade who live in a dreamland where India survives only on Solar and Wind, there are several "public-interest" court petitions stalling construction on one pretext or another. Local politicians were only too happy to buy media attention and make things worse. To get around this, we are forced to import higher and higher quantities of coal and oil. Yes..that is SO much 'greener'. In fact several coal power plants are not even running due to coal shortage. This year has been especially terrible due to high temperatures and a bad monsoon leading to more power consumption. It's a complete mess. And I don't have any optimism that things will improve. We will continue stumbling along to the next crisis..that is if this one gets solved.
- luser001 14y ago
  AFAIK, it's not just the utopian "green brigade" as you think. The amount of compensation that the govt. gives when forcibly acquiring land for nuclear projects is pathetically low. Many of them may fighting because they think that is the only way to get better compensation. See e.g., http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-19/india/29145859_1_compensation-package-villages-lands http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-19/india... the units seem to be unreliable, but we're talking around $3000 per family in compensation (938 hectares over 2335 families at Rs400k/hectare and Rs50 per USD). LOL. I'd stall a project if I was going to be uprooted, my livelihood (i.e., traditional fishing grounds destroyed) and I was given a insultingly low $3k as compensation.
joshuahedlund 14y ago
How many years ago did India not have 600 million people with electricity to lose?

63 points by gauravsc 14y ago

What a shame ! Useless government !!! It affected ATMS, TRAINS , more than 30% indian population affected by this outage crisis

gauravsc 14y ago
This government is totally useless, ineffective, arrogant and insensitive.
kleim 14y ago
And you forgot the 70% of unavailable call centers in the US!

mqzaidi 14y ago

It started at midday and there are already such scenes, I wonder what will happen during peak commute times. Note that the first area to have power restored is NDMC, which houses top politicians and bureaucrats.

gauravsc 14y ago
The best part is that they have decided to promote the Power Minister Sushil Shinde as the Home Minister, now all the terrorist will die rolling on the floor laughing.

nsns 14y ago

As far as I know, Indians are more prepared for such failures than most people. Every (middle class) Indian house I know has batteries or a generator because of the daily load shedding. Such failures somewhat complicate the commendable struggles against new nuclear plants and dams (e.g., http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2803/stories/20110211280309000.htm http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2803/stories/201102112803090...)

gauravsc 14y ago
Even Indians are not used to such large scale load shedding, where almost half of the country is without power.
- iamgopal 14y ago
  faith my friend, they will get used to. "Getting used to" is the art every Indian has mastered.

kamaal 14y ago

In short the reasons for failures are something like this. a. No proper control systems/automation to detect and prevent overload/tripping in case of excessive power consumption by any particular state. b. No back up/redundancy planning. c. The grid architecture is badly designed, and leads to cascading failures of sub grids. d. Low quality equipment which fails often. India's energy infrastructure is ancient. Its patch work for overgrown villages(Read cities) totally incapable of meeting any sort of dependable demands. Add to this massive bureaucracy, license raj and corruption in purchase of equipment in electricity boards. They buy low quality equipment which fails often(because they are bribed to do so), since equipment fails often they buy more. The state of affairs is so bad, transformers fail and burst even if rains a little heavily. What follows next is hours together of effort installing and fixing new transformers. This is a common scenario in many areas in a city like Bangalore. This is apart for hours together scale of unscheduled load shedding which is frequent. On top of this there are frequent protests and lobbying to stop the construction of power plants(Hydel/Nuclear or otherwise). And these are all state controlled monopolies. Recently I heard, Electricity board in Bangalore is complaining against builders of gated communities(Flats and Villas) and forcing them to use Govt supplied equipment. Because the private builders are using better quality equipment which is exposing and is making the Govt board look bad in front of them. Any attempt to correct this system is met by massive political hostility. And people proposing modern changes are perceived as anti-Indian culture capitalist stooges being used by companies in the west to sell their equipment.

intended 14y ago
Would love to know why you say what you do. Do you work in the field? I just switched over to a firm in the power generator sector in India, and the Govt Contracts for power are beasts. Those are things which we make sure we go over every page to fulfill. They are also not that archaic - their backup/redundancy planning exists, at least on paper. We've supplied it for various institutions/bodies. Plus the Engineers in BHEL and the like are pretty smart chaps, sure they may be slow but they are far from being daft. (Again! My experience, and mileage will vary) Not sure about how bad the architecture is, or how badly designed it is either. From what I recall quality levels are a patchwork. As I assume are equipment quality levels. I'm not well versed in this, so I'm more interested in learning, whats going on.

intended 14y ago

Well hopefully this will happen for a few more days, and that will galvanize people enough to get someone to deal with the rampant power theft, and terrible power gen vs demand ratio.

kamaal 14y ago
Talking of power theft. Slums steal massive amounts of power without paying a rupee. Also same with street side functions, processions and religious events. Everybody feels they have freedom to steal. No wonder corruption is so difficult to eliminate in this country.
- intended 14y ago
  I'm usually very hesitant when it comes to discussions on corruption in the country. Corruption carries the burden of many meanings in it and so its very easy to get caught up talking past other people. For one there are several different types of corruption, I usually treat them as small c corruption and Big C "Corruption". A break down for Small C corruption for Bangalore between June July can be got here - from ipaidabribe: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=413057582064179&set=a.139512526085354.12957.138552116181395&type=1&relevant_count=1 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=413057582064179&s... (for some reason their site doesn't have the photo, so had to dig up their Facebook page) Then there is large 'Corruption', the purvey of our politicians which has to be treated differently. Thats what we need the Lokpal bill for. The new changes to service tax though, will slowly close many of the loop holes though.
- luser001 14y ago
  Wrt the conventional wisdom that "Slums steal massive amounts of power without paying a rupee". Frontline magazine did a study which showed that a huge amount of power theft was occuring at industrial consumers. http://www.flonnet.com/fl1906/19060950.htm http://www.flonnet.com/fl1906/19060950.htm (it's a little dry in the typical Frontline style. I hope you will read it). Also, you didn't mention businesses in places in Chandni Chowk, Lajpat Nagar etc? Given the other "cost-cutting"^Wtax-evading measures they take, I would feel very confident in assuming that they don't pay for most of their energy use.

sirfried 14y ago

Incredible India

mjn 14y ago

If Wikipedia isn't missing any, it looks like these are now the two largest blackouts in history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#Largest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#Largest

pm90 14y ago

I'm appalled at the no. of comments that say "the govt. is useless/shit and that the system is torn by corruption". Of course it is. More constructive comments, please!

lenkite 14y ago

Let's face reality - we have a power crisis and political sops to greedy states only exacerbate this. We were supposed to have several nuclear reactors functional and giving power to regional grids by 2012. Thanks to the 'green' brigade who live in a dreamland where India survives only on Solar and Wind, there are several "public-interest" court petitions stalling construction on one pretext or another. Local politicians were only too happy to buy media attention and make things worse. To get around this, we are forced to import higher and higher quantities of coal and oil. Yes..that is SO much 'greener'. In fact several coal power plants are not even running due to coal shortage. This year has been especially terrible due to high temperatures and a bad monsoon leading to more power consumption. It's a complete mess. And I don't have any optimism that things will improve. We will continue stumbling along to the next crisis..that is if this one gets solved.

luser001 14y ago
AFAIK, it's not just the utopian "green brigade" as you think. The amount of compensation that the govt. gives when forcibly acquiring land for nuclear projects is pathetically low. Many of them may fighting because they think that is the only way to get better compensation. See e.g., http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-19/india/29145859_1_compensation-package-villages-lands http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-19/india... the units seem to be unreliable, but we're talking around $3000 per family in compensation (938 hectares over 2335 families at Rs400k/hectare and Rs50 per USD). LOL. I'd stall a project if I was going to be uprooted, my livelihood (i.e., traditional fishing grounds destroyed) and I was given a insultingly low $3k as compensation.

joshuahedlund 14y ago

How many years ago did India not have 600 million people with electricity to lose?