INDIA IN THE ALL-TIME BIGGEST BLACKOUT

Why India Has These Massive Power Blackout Problems

Mamta Badkar, July 31, 2012 (Business Insider)

“A second power failure hit 600 million people in North and East India on Tuesday, leaving commuters stranded, businesses without electricity and impacting water supply. 19 states were impacted by this second consecutive power outage, a day after a power outage impacted about 370 million people…

“India's power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the outage on states that have exceeded their power quota from the Northern grid, and warned that states will be penalized. He also said that Shinde that power has been restored to 45 percent of the northern region, 35 percent of the eastern region and 100 percent to of the north-east."

click to enlarge

“…[T]ransmission and distribution losses in some states are as much as 50 percent because of theft and corruption by employees…India's coalition government has been accused of losing $210 billion in potential revenues by selling coal fields to top industrialists…[O]ver 26000MW of power stations are idle due to the non-availability of coal…[With drought diminishing the 19 percent of electricity supplied by hydro and] grid failure…the entire power system…is headed for disaster…While massive-scale power outages like the ones that have crippled the North of the country the past two days aren't frequent, India has long had power problems and rolling power-cuts…India has missed every annual target to increase electricity production capacity since 1951…

“…[T]he gap between demand and supply of power jump to 10.2 percent in March this year, from 7.7 percent in March 2011…[C]oal shortages…[and] subsidies, price controls and inadequate investment in resources like coal and natural gas have hurt development…Prime minister Manmohan Singh is trying to get $400 billion in investment in the power sector, as he hopes to get an additional 76,000 megawatts of power by 2017…For now, the government has appointed a three-member panel to study the causes of the power failure, and the committee will submit its report in the next two weeks.”

Tweet