Power failure in Northern India due to Grid Fault

[Singh]

WHAT WAS REVEALED WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN INDIA
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As world news events go, the biggest power failure in history—which struck India Tuesday afternoon, plunging almost seven hundred million people into hypothetical darkness—may have been less momentous than advertised. There was chaos, of course: gridlocked traffic, stalled trains, and stranded commuters. Water supplies were interrupted, hospitals ceased all but essential services, and at least a few hundred unlucky miners in two eastern states were trapped underground for several nerve-wracking hours.

But power cuts are hardly uncommon in India, which is why offices and factories have diesel generators and the homes of the better-off come equipped with battery backup systems. (Basharat Peer has written about how strategies for shortages are woven into daily life.) Many people caught in the middle of the world's biggest power outage experienced it as a brief flicker of the lights. And many others didn't experience it at all. Though the headlines announced that seven hundred million people across twenty-one states had lost power, only about three hundred and twenty million of those had any electricity to begin with: in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and one of its poorest, sixty-three per cent of households, or about a hundred and twenty-five million people, lack access to electricity. Nationwide, about one third of households (roughly four hundred million people, more than everyone in the United States) don't have electricity—which sounds like an astonishing number, until you consider that twenty years ago fifty-eight per cent of households were without electric power.

The dramatic transformation of the Indian economy in the past two decades—which lifted a few hundred million people out of desperate and miserable poverty into merely miserable poverty, swelled the ranks of a rapidly expanding middle class, and led foreign commentators to admiringly forecast India's emergence as the world's next superpower—is usually known here by a simple shorthand: "the Indian growth story." It's an unavoidable phrase, and you can't read the newspaper for more than a few days without spotting it: senior government ministers insist that "the Indian growth story is intact" even in the face of the ongoing economic slowdown; business leaders (collectively dubbed "India Inc" by headline writers) demand that the government must take immediate action to "preserve the Indian growth story"; opposition politicians proclaim that the ruling Congress Party has "killed the Indian growth story."

By the standards of cherished semi-mythical national narratives, the Indian growth story rests on considerable empirical evidence. But the phrase itself admits an uncertain confidence, an anxiety that the "story" may have been more compelling than the underlying "growth." It's an anxiety that has become increasingly evident in the past two years, as ten per cent growth has fallen to six per cent, inflation has remained high, and the rupee has slumped to record lows. Meanwhile, many Indians have begun to worry that the story's uplifting central premise—that rapid economic expansion would sweep away the intractable problems of the past—may have simply been false.

Which brings us to the real significance of the world's biggest power failure: for many commentators, it was a minor inconvenience but a major international embarrassment—another brutal blow to the growth story, on a scale so stupendously grand that the whole world took notice. Nothing captured the resulting blend of wounded pride and thwarted ambition better than the headline in the Economic Times, the country's largest business paper, which plaintively declared "Superpower India, RIP."

The quotes from India Inc in Wednesday's newspapers acknowledged that work stoppages had in some cases been costly, but the real focus was on the gaping tear in the narrative fabric. Chandrajit Banerjee, the director of the Confederation of Indian Industry, worried that the grid collapse had given the rest of the world "a very negative image of India, when already sentiments about the country are low on account of the current economic situation." The power failure, he added, had "created a huge dent in the country's reputation that is most unfortunate."

While industrialists fretted over the opinion of international investors, the frustrations of an increasingly vocal and discontented middle class—a term usually employed here to denote something like the 9.9 per cent just below the top 0.1 per cent—boiled over into a full-throated rage, almost all of it directed at the Congress-led government, whose incompetence is widely blamed (at least among that middle class) for much of what ails the nation.

Contempt for politicians is hardly unique to India, nor is it a new phenomenon in a place where political scientists long considered "anti-incumbency" to be the determining factor in most elections. But among the aforementioned middle class, whose views are faithfully reflected in the English-language media (and, by extension, in the dispatches of the foreign correspondents who read it), the intensity of this contempt has gone supernova. Manmohan Singh, the country's mild-mannered and media-shy Prime Minister, was hailed as a technocrat hero when his government won a resounding reëlection victory three years ago; lately, the paeans to managerial efficiency have been supplanted by a scorn and derision.

Much as with the growth story, there is a real foundation beneath the edifice of aggrieved exaggeration: a series of high-profile corruption scandals; a refusal to remove inept or crooked ministers; venal infighting among coalition partners; visible indecisiveness and frequent policy U-turns; comically tone-deaf media relations—the list goes on and on. It would take an entire volume to inventory every major complaint, though in a pinch a scrapbook of this year's newspaper headlines would suffice.

In this context, the power failure was significant less for its scale than for the way it highlighted almost every failing attributed to the ruling coalition by its critics. The actual collapse of the electrical grid—one day after a similar failure cut power to an area containing only three hundred million people—has been blamed on individual states overdrawing electricity at a time when peak demand far exceeded available supply, which ticked the boxes for "inadequate investment in infrastructure" and "failure to reform inefficient power sector," along with subsequent accusations of "preferential treatment to states ruled by coalition allies."

But that was just the beginning: while the lights were out on Tuesday, the government announced a previously planned cabinet reshuffle, which included an ill-timed promotion for the country's power minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, who was elevated to a far more senior post as home minister. ("Refusal to remove inept ministers"; "tone-deaf media relations"—check and check.) The press, already steaming with rage (in some cases, sans air conditioning), erupted in howls of indignant disbelief. These grew louder on Wednesday morning when Shinde, all but perp-walked before the media, declared his own performance as power minister "excellent." (His successor at the power ministry did not help matters by proclaiming that India has "the world's best and largest power grid.") Shinde followed his initial remarks with what American political commentators might call a reverse dog-whistle, proudly trumpeting his long record of loyalty to the Gandhi family, whose dynastic rule over the Congress Party drives critics particularly mad—signalling rather clearly that merit wasn't exactly the reason for his elevation.

The outrage the power failure elicited from people whose generators hummed right through the blackout suggests a frustration with something more gloomy than the darkness: the persistent intrusion of India's reality upon its aspirations. The quiet fear is that the flaws of the present government, however numerous, may not suffice to explain the entire decline from exuberance to pessimism. In the end, what connects the fevered middle-class contempt for ruling politicians to the world's largest blackout is the anger and anxiety laid bare by the diminishing power of the growth story: the people who were led to believe "Superpower India" was around the corner are now demanding retribution against whoever snuffed out its light.

What Was Revealed When the Lights Went Out in India : The New Yorker

 

[Oracle]

Generators whirring, India's factories shrug off blackouts

 

[Virendra]

What would happen to the operating Cost ? and then to the retail prices for the consumers ?

 

[no smoking]

This is the reason that Chinese must not comment about democracy and stuff.

Politicians are voted in, and they form the legislature. They sit in parliament. They are voted out, or re-voted in every 5 years. These politicians take high-level decisions.

So, what is your point? Politicians are not responsible for the buraucracy under their management? Or They have no say in any "low-level" decisions?

And please, don't think that you are the only one with democracy experience. Most of chineses in this forum are living and voting in overseas.

The bureaucracy OTOH, is a vast and monolithic body. The people in the bureaucracy are called IAS (Indian Administrative Services) officers. Entering the bureaucracy requires you to pass an immensely tough competitive examination, held nationwide. There is a lot of scrambling to get into the prestigious IAS, and only a very small selected number of people make it through the selection process.

The bureaucracy is not voted in. The politicians may take high-level decisions, but the nitty-gritty practical details are usually in the hands of the bureaucracy.

Again, who select those people in bureaucracy? God or Indian politicians?
And who are those people in your bureaucracy? Indian or Chinese?

 

[ani82v]

Dark night rises, not even a ray of hope

For two consecutive days, the power grids collapsed, leaving large parts of the country without electric supply for several hours. The blame game for the failure is still on. Fact is, the Congress-led UPA has no answers.

From the Power Grid Corporation of India and Coal India Limited to the State Governments and the Union Government, almost everybody has been blamed for the shameful power outage that India suffered for two days in a row after the northern, central and north-eastern power grids failed.

The blame-game went something like this: The Power Ministry blamed the grid failure for the blackout. The manager of the grid, the Power Grid Corporation of India, blamed the State Governments for overdrawing power. The State Governments claimed that the power generating companies were unable to meet the high demand for electricity at the peak of summer. Power generating companies like the NTPC said there was a shortage in coal supply as Coal India Limited was unable to guarantee the supply. Coal India Limited said the problem was with the Union Minister of Environment and Forests that had not given the green signal without which the Union Government could not raise its production by the much needed 25 per cent. The Coal Ministry backed Coal India Limited and blamed the Environment Ministry for placing a blanket ban on mining in forest areas.

The round robin game thus goes on and the finger is always pointed at the next-door neighbour. But the accusations take the players nowhere. The country, meanwhile, continues to suffer huge power outages. Unable to meet commercial commitments, industry too must depend on expensive diesel-generated power. And, as demand for diesel goes up, its enormous subsidy bill burns an increasingly large hole in the pockets of oil supply companies. That in turn raises the fiscal deficit of the Government which leads to rising inflation. At the end of the day it is the common man who suffers.

The crux of this problem lies in the fact that there is a power vacuum at 7, Race Course Road, from where the Prime Minister operates. Instead, the power centre is at 10, Janpath, where Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi resides. It is this diarchy that is responsible for a situation wherein the PMO tells Coal India Limited to keep the coal supply trigger at 80 per cent but the latter has the cheek to tell the Prime Minister the trigger point should be at 65 per cent. The trigger point is that percentage of the agreed supply below which if coal supply drop, Coal India Limited (the supplier) will have to take heavy penalties.

The PMO, supposed to be the power centre of the Government, calls two conferences within a fortnight and tries to reconcile the conflicting versions on the power crisis. Apart from the specific days on which the power grids collapsed, there is evidence that in the last four months supply of both and coal have been deficit as a result of which functioning or ready-to-function power generating plants were just dead horses.

For instance, the Delhi Government's 750 MW Bawana gas-based power generator is currently not working as the promised gas supply has not arrive. The 1,500 MW Rosa power plant is also out of service because there has been no coal supply. Similarly, NTPC — the largest public sector power company — has on its hands a dead 6,000 MW plant and another 21,000 MW plant which is functioning far below critical point.

Governance under the Congress-led UPA appears more like a circus in cyber space — power generation is just on computer screens, not in reality. How else can one explain the regular, countrywide power cuts happening at a time when the Power Ministry claims to have added 19,459 MW in just one year of the 11th Five Year Plan period and 54,000 MW in the whole 2007-12 period? If true, this would have been the biggest ever increase in India's capacity for power creation in the past several decades.

The simple fact is that this creation of additional power generating capacity — a record no doubt — is an empty achievement because it is useless without the fuel that is needed to work the power generators. And that fuel, both coal and gas, is not available because Coal India Limited cannot mine the 500 million tonnes of coal needed every year (this number will soon rise to 600 million tonnes) and the country cannot afford to import all the coal that it needs. Similarly, gas supply has suddenly shrunk as the promise at Reliance India Limited's KG-D6 location has turned a dud.:Cry:

Right at the heart of the coal supply controversy is the scam, that is coming out only now, that coal mines having been allotted to fake companies that have simply transferred the licence to the actual benefactors and minted money in the process. Also, the Environment Ministry is unable to get its house in order and, therefore, there are delays in issuing mining licences to other public sector undertakings. In turn CIL wants higher price for its coal which would naturally raise generation costs and therefore distribution costs.

The Union Government is unable to take a decision on whether to raise domestic coal prices or import the black gold at higher than domestic prices. It is also unable to decide on breaking Coal India Limited's coal monopoly. It has put off decisions to open up more mines but remains helpless in preventing illegal mining that constituted a whopping six per cent of the country's total coal output. The Oil Ministry has also been delaying auctions of the prospective oil and gas locations for over a year now.

In a tightly governed country, the chief executive, namely the Prime Minister, would have taken some bold decisions to break up production and supply monopolies, aligned fuel prices to costs and set the wheels of power generation running at express speed. The present slumber in Government however has resulted in all round price escalation or inflation.

The Congress-led UPA blames the State Governments for not implementing reforms as laid down in the Electricity Act 2003. But it is Congress-ruled States that have not cared to introduce the reforms. The Act itself was passed by the NDA Government in 2003. But the two subsequent Governments at the Centre, both led by the Congress, should take the blame as there is neither any governance at the centre nor in Congress-led States.

It is a slap on the face of the Congress, and a huge embarrassment for the party, when the only State that has surplus power in this distressing situation — Gujarat — is led by the main Opposition party, the BJP. Secularists have blamed State Chief Minister Narendra Modi pretty much for everythin,g but he was the only one among 30 Chief Ministers who could offer the national power grid 2,000 MW of power from his State at a time when there is deficit everywhere. Gujarat, under the stewardship of Mr Modi, is the only State which has completed power reforms. As a result, there is a 24 hour power supply in every one of the 18,000 villages in Gujarat.

Thus, the power black-out story is a story of poor governance power across most State capitals and definitely in the national capital.

 

[SajeevJino]

Dark night rises, not even a ray of hope

For two consecutive days, the power grids collapsed, leaving large parts of the country without electric supply for several hours. The blame game for the failure is still on. Fact is, the Congress-led UPA has no answers.
.

 

[Raj30]

North India may face power cut as 3 plants temporarily closed

New Delhi, Aug 20: Northern states, including Delhi, could face power cuts as three hydro-power plants that together supply about 3,000 MW of electricity to the region have been shut down.

The 1,500 MW Nathpa Jhakri, 1,000 MW Karcham-Wangtoo and 300 MW Chamera II hydro-power projects have been shut temporarily due to high silt levels in water, sources said.

Electricity generated in these three hydro-power plants is fed to Northern Grid, that caters to 28 per cent of the country's population.

A Power Grid Corp official said there is shortfall of around 3,000 MW supply to the Northern Grid due to on generation by the three hydro projects.

According to him, supply shortage in the grid was noticed at around 1000 hrs, when the demand was about 33,000 MW. However, the situation could not be termed as grid disturbance, he added.

Meanwhile, an Uttar Pradesh government official said the state averted collapse of the Northern Grid at around 1000hrs.

The latest incident comes within three weeks of failure of Northern, Eastern and North Eastern grids on July 31 that led one of the world's biggest power outages.

The Northern Grid, that covers nine regions, itself had tripped for two consecutive days on July 30 and July 31. When contacted, an official of SJVN, that operates the Nathpa Jhakri project, said the plant was shut today due to high silt content in water from Sutlej river.

"The plant has to be closed if the silt level in water goes up beyond the benchmark level... we are closely analysing the situation and expect to restart the plant tomorrow morning," Nathpa Jhakri's Executive Director R K Bansal said.