Electricity grids fail across half of India (620 million people without electricity)

NEW DELHI (AP) — India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest blackout.

Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.

The massive failure - a day after a similar, but smaller power failure - has raised serious concerns about India's outdated infrastructure and the government's inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.

Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the new crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity.

"Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut," he told reporters.

The new power failure affected 620 million people across 20 of India's 28 states - about double the population of the United States. The blackout was unusual in its reach, stretching from the border with Myanmar in the northeast to the Pakistani border about 3,000 kilometers (1,870 miles) away. Its impact, however, was softened by Indians' familiarity with frequent blackouts and the widespread use of backup generators for major businesses and key facilities such as hospitals and airports.

Shinde later said power was fully restored in the northeast grid four hours after it went down, and that the north grid had 45 percent power and the east grid 35 percent.

I am surprised regional rolling blackouts haven’t already occurred in the US during this hot summer especially with the EPA shutting down some 20 coal fired generating plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Our electric grid has to be teetering in this hot weather. I recently drove by a large wind farm in southern MN on one very hot (100+ degrees) afternoon and less than 10% of the windmills were turning despite what I assume would be a time of peak electric demand. So presumably there has to be a bunch of fossil fuel plants running to make up for what the windmills aren’t producing.

This is actually a relatively predictable result due to actually running out of coal for existing and new power generation due to colossal self-inflicted fuel supply mismanagement by the Indian government regulators.

India Struggles to Deliver Enough Power is well worth reading at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/business/global/india-struggles-to-deliver-enough-electricity-for-growth.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Quotes from some of the article:
ELLORE, India — India has long struggled to provide enough electricity to light its homes and power its industry around the clock. In recent years, the government and private sector sought to change that by building scores of new power plants.

India has tried to built new power plants, like the one partly completed in the state of Andhra Pradesh. But there is often no fuel to run the plants. Companies like Sowmya Industries are hampered by power shortages.

But that campaign is now running into difficulties because the country cannot get enough fuel — principally coal — to run the plants. Clumsy policies, poor management and environmental concerns have hampered the country’s efforts to dig up fuel fast enough to keep up with its growing need for power.

A complex system of subsidies and price controls has limited investment, particularly in resources like coal and natural gas. It has also created anomalies, like retail electricity prices that are lower than the cost of producing power, which lead to big losses at state-owned utilities. An unsettled debate about how much of its forests India should turn over to mining has also limited coal production.......

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