India's recent power blackout

An interesting post-mortem of India's blackout -- from IEEE Spectrum:

A Post-Mortem on India's Blackout
What set the stage for last week�s power outage in India, which left some 650 million people without electricity, was a widening rift between growing peak demand and the amount of generation available to meet that demand. A system had been put in place to ration the amount of power each state could draw from the national grid during peaks, but evidently those limits were simply ignored, IEEE Fellow John McDonald told National Public Radio in an interview with public radio�s much-admired program, �The TakeAway.�

And the root cause -- simple me-first and an ostrich-like attitude:

At 1 PM on July 31, on the eve of the blackout, loads exceeded the government-set maximums for electricity to be delivered by 7 to 132 percent in the nine states mainly affected by the outage, said McDonald. In Punjab, the excess electricity draw was 300 MW (7 percent above the maximum) in Uttar Pradesh 1600 MW (64 percent) and in Rajasthan 1100 MW (79 percent). On average, the 9 states were 28 percent above the maximum load they were allowed to draw.

According to R. Nagaraja, managing director at the Power Research & Development Consultants Pvt. Ltd., the grid discipline system depended on states' being charged far higher rates for electricity drawn above their peak load limits. In the past that system had worked rather well, and with improvements in the nation's grid infrastructure, operators had perhaps become somewhat complacent. But with recent shortages of water, reduced power generation, high demand for electricity and a political climate preceding elections, grid players and regulators couldn't resist the temptation to step farther and farther over the line.

Getting back to McDonald's insights, he says that as for the automated systems that ordinarily shed load automatically when power demand surpassed supplies, they were generally �jumpered." �Standard procedure in advanced industrial countries is to use automatic underfrequency and undervoltage relays with multiple tiers of settings. If the system is still collapsing the SCADA/EMS would automatically (using its prioritized list of breakers) begin shedding load by opening substation circuit breakers until the system stopped collapsing.� That kind of system was supposed to be operational in India too but, presumably for the same reasons peak load limited were exceeded to recklessly, it had been deactivated.

As best one can tell, the basic cause of the Indian outage was an ostrich-like attitude by both the national government and the state governments toward the country�s fundamental electricity dilemmas. To start with McDonald�s main point, India�s peak demand has grown by 4.9 percent a year since 2006-07; with generation failing to keep pace, the peak supply deficit now exceeds 10 percent.

Come on now -- it's just one more Megawatt. What will that do. A sobering observation:

An aggravating factor, mentioned by McDonald and discussed at length in an earlier IEEE Spectrum post, was a shortage of water in India because of weaker-than-usual monsoons. Jigar Shah, CEO of Jigar Shah Consulting, points out in a recent Earth2Tech post that the power sector is India�s greatest single consumer of water�bigger than agriculture�and that within the power sector, almost all the water is consumed by the coal-fired power plants that produce the lion�s share of India�s electricity.

Just wow! It will be interesting to see if India starts building nukes -- LFTR would be perfect for them. 600 Million people were without electricity -- that is just under double the entire population of the United States.