Power cuts plunge 20 of India's 28 states into darkness as energy suppliers fail to meet growing demand.Read it at Mother Jones
India Blackouts Leave 700 Million Without Power
Helen Pidd
This is either an anomaly or the beginning of trend. Impossible to know which yet. But if it is a trend, it is an ominous one.
10 comments:
Or somebody high up decided to do it on purpose?
Dan,
A weak monsoon has led to lower Hydro power production coupled with much higher temperatures due to a lack of rain. This caused and increased load on the grid, leading to a total grid collapse.
It is sort of like a set of interconnected dominoes falling. A collapsed power grid takes a fair amount of effort to restart, particularly because everybody wants to be the first to draw power off the system!
Don't know how much is known yet. But grids go down for several reason, one being overload and the other emergency shutdown to prevent damage.
The problem is that electric grids are now generally run at near capacity for economic reasons, but this is often way beyond what physicists would recommend as the margin of safety. So when there is a component failure or a spike in use, the limit may be breached.
Moreover, there is a cascading effect so that if the system is not shut down quickly many components can successively fail. The controllers try to shunt the power around but that is not always possible in a system running at capacity.
In addition, many parts of the system are old to get every last drop of life out them.
India used to be known for its sporadic power and telephone services, but I don't know about lately since deregulation.
I'm sure that there will be an investigation into it, whatever that means.
Doesnt look like the grid over there is very "high tech"
https://www.google.com/search?q=wiring+in+india&hl=en&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=7jkZUKKvEsa46wHI1YCQCw&ved=0CFMQ_AUoAQ&biw=1517&bih=741
Maybe this is what happens when you export your best engineers to the west....
rsp,
India has a culture in which "not working with your hands" has high status. Thus, Indian engineers do not like doing physical work. So anybody who gets educated does not want to "work with their hands" thus the actual physical work is left to uneducated workers (often illiterate) - Tools appropriate to the task are put under lock and key - never to be used - as the people who actually do the work would "spoil" the tools. In my experience, this was the attitude 30 years ago, and this was the attitude 2 years ago (in an actual conversation with an IIT engineer working for an Indian phone company) Thus high tech phone cables are joined by twisting two wires together, and the joint left open to the weather and twisting in the wind! (Actual experience that lead to the conversations with the workmen and later with the aforesaid IIT engineer(s))
Clonal,
Looks like from these pictures in the google search that this is what is going on wrt workmanship.
Sounds like any good engineers that would want to be involved in success would want to get the hell out of there... perhaps I dont blame them for wanting to get out of that chaos.
Probably calls into question whether we will ever see the general increase in global demand that many project to come from India... they wont be able to install and maintain the infrastructure required to support the demand unless they somehow are led to huge social changes across the board over there looks like...
rsp,
Power has been restored.
Matt,
Indian engineers when they come to this country have the same attitude as the ones left in India. However they do adapt to the US culture and "will work with their hands" if forced to do so. However, those attitudes are hard to get rid off - so those "engineers" shift to finding jobs as "financial engineers" working with "FIRE"
Beautiful...
Plenty of US engineers that refuse to go down to the floor, too, even when there is an obvious problem.
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