DEHRADUN, Northern India - The massive
electricity outages that brought India to a
standstill this week are the result of a ticking
time-bomb waiting to explode. More than 300
million people were affected when the first cut
hit, but that number soon escalated in what may be
the worst power crash in history.
Hundreds
of trains stalled and hospitals and essential
services stopped functioning in the early hours of
Monday. Normalcy didn't limp back until dawn.
Bureaucratic heads rolled and power minister
Sushil Kumar Shinde (now shifted to the home
ministry) appointed an investigative task force.
But then the bad news got worse. Another
massive breakdown struck at around 1.30 pm on
Tuesday, affecting many more
hundreds of millions
across northern and eastern India.
"Power
grids fail: 20 states affected, 600 million people
suffer", screamed a headlines in the Hindustan
Times. The capital, New Delhi, was also in
blackout. Traffic lights went haywire, the metro
railway ground to a halt leaving commuters stuck
in tunnels. Affected states included Punjab,
Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, regions that are key to
the national economy.
More than 200 miners
were trapped underground in eastern India, in the
Eastern Coalfields, in Sodepur and Satgram in
Burdwan districts of West Bengal state. They were
directed to a temporarily safe area having oxygen
and ventilation, while efforts to rescue them are
on. The government of West Bengal declared a
public holiday on Tuesday.
Officials of
the state-owned Power Grid Corporation of India,
the apex power transmission body, restored over
90% of power within seven hours, another world
record of sorts. It took nearly four days to
restore power during the major power failure
across the US in 2003 and 2008, and about 18 hours
for normalcy to return during India's last major
power crash in 2002.
Since 8.00 pm last
night, states like Uttarakhand had an
uninterrupted power supply for 12 hours - a rare
treat in a summer that's seen innumerable power
cuts and power failures.
According to
initial findings, the villain behind the misery
was one state or more withdrawing excess power,
resulting in a collapse of the entire power grid.
Somebody overdrew on their power account by 3,000
MW. A chain reaction caused three more grids to
crash, and kept disaster headline writers busy
until Tuesday evening. The northern, eastern and
north-eastern grids account for 50,000 mega watts
of electricity.
Delhi needs a daily
electricity dose of around 4,000 MW. It had only
about 48 MW around 1.40 pm when the power grids
collapsed.
India need not again generate
such bad publicity if the lessons from the
blackout are learned, but they must be learned
quickly.
Merely depending on
hydro-electricity, or even more controversial
nuclear power, is unlikely to meet the growing
electricity appetite of India. Industrial demands
for electricity have risen in the world's
second-fastest growing economy, even as millions
of its more prosperous people are suddenly
discovering, that life is difficult to negotiate
without air-conditioning.
The question is
not obviously whether India should swelter in
ascetic discomfort with less air coolers sold, as
a New York Times article cautiously wondered, but
what are new ways and means for the growing
electricity demand to make acquaintance with
supply?
India is already the sixth-largest
consumer of electricity in the world.
An
electricity-desperate India even struck a deal
this April to import 5.4 billion kilowatts from
the neighboring tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan,
sating just 1% of India's annual electricity
thirst.
The thirst only looks likely to
worsen. The air conditioner-manufacturing
industry, for instance, this year expects a 15%
increase in sales, over the 3.1 million units sold
across India in 2010-11.
Leading Indian
air-con manufacturer Blue Star, Korean
manufacturers Samsung and LG, and Japanese brands
like Hitachi, Toshiba Panasonic and Daikin, have
eagerly announced more aggressive marketing plans
to air cool India this year.
One could see
the power crash coming when most hotel owners in
prime tourist locations across northern India went
on a luxury-accommodation building spree two or
three years ago. Air-conditioners were apparently
becoming as much a "necessity" as a tap with
running water.
Add the flourishing air-con
industry to growing demand for water heaters,
microwave ovens, toasters, washing machines and
all manner of other electricity-driven gadgets
that an average Indian household had happily done
without about 30 years ago.
More of India
may soon discover that dependence on luxuries is
no guarantee to happiness; a fully centrally
air-conditioned dwelling can turn to a sweltering
rat trap of misery when power blows out as it did
the past 24 hours.
The major power
blackout served a blessing in disguise, and
another warning that countries like India and
China, with a billion-plus population, cannot
simply afford to blindly follow insane patterns of
over-consumption that has ruined certain Western
economies.
"Economic reforms", or the
relentless neo-conservative pressure on India to
unwisely open ultra-critical sectors, like the
$500 billion retail industry to billionaire
Western profiteers, is guaranteed to propel
developing economies to a situation where planet
earth would need another two planet earths to make
electricity sustainable.
More electricity
demand has already translated to less electricity
supply. This summer, most popular holiday resorts
in northern India were running on diesel
generators for nearly eight hours a day - courtesy
the frequency of power cuts and unscheduled power
failures in May, June and July. Most often, the
generators too collapsed from fatigue.
This grand national electricity crisis of
the past 24 hours had been simmering all summer.
If necessity is the mother of invention,
the power crisis should announce the birth of
urgency in the development solar power and other
alternative power sources like wind energy across
India. Conventional electricity can only serve as
a back-up to such abundant natural, green forms of
generating power to run daily lives.
India
is one of the most sun-blessed countries on Earth.
Most parts of the country receive over 300 days of
sunlight.
According to Ecoworld, the sun
gifts an incredible 12.2 trillion watt-hours per
square mile per year.
However, India needs
great effort not only to harness this solar power.
India's 2010-11 federal budget invested about US
$180 million for solar energy projects. The
funding was over double the previous year, but
much more investment and work awaits -
particularly a massive public awareness campaign
for people to make use of solar power in daily
life.
Major corporate houses like the Tata
Group are investing and marketing solar power. But
the overall corporate interest is still on the
fringes.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh
launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar
Mission in January 2010, with the goal to make
India a global leader in solar energy (*1). The
Mission set the target of deploying 20,000 MW of
grid connected solar power by 2022. But not much
is heard about the National Solar Mission in daily
news.
Yet solar power technology has
evolved cost-effectively in recent years, and
wider use of solar technology such as the new
solar ATMs in rural India (see Solar
ATMs for rural India, Asia Times Online, July
6, 2012). Solar water heaters, for instance, are
efficient enough that hot water flows even without
sunlight for a day; kitchen gadgets like solar
rice cookers are inexpensive, costing about 4,000
rupees (about US$72).
But there is no buzz
in the national media about solar energy. Even
after the latest mega crisis, opinion pieces were
advising more on how best to generate more
hydro-electric power.
Building more dams
isn't going to solve the problem. It's a
self-defeating equation that more clearly reveals
itself during relative drought, such as the
current weaker monsoon. More dams equals less
forest cover equals less rains equals less water
in dams equals less hydro electricity equals more
power crises.
The latest blackout was an
instance of the common Indian trait of not
immediately attending to problems. We learn to
live with them. "Adjust", one of India's favorite
words, is both a national strength and weakness.
The problem gets more seriously noticed
when it becomes a crisis. Perhaps we will only
start seriously looking for solutions when the
crisis graduates to a catastrophe - as perhaps an
eight-day power breakdown across most of India.
Instead of waiting for such disasters to
inevitably knock on our doors, India has little
choice but to start accepting nature's
alternatives like the generous gift of power from
the Sun or Surya, the solar god. And the rest of
the world too will benefit from creative
technology solutions India and China invent to
feed their massive electricity needs.
Notes: 1. Jawaharlal Nehru
National Solar Mission, Resolution
(http://www.mnre.gov.in/solar-mission/jnnsm/resolution-2/),
January 11, 2010. Ministry of New and Renewable
Energy, Government of India.
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