About 10 percent of the world’s population lost power recently as a blackout swept across northern India. As many as 700 million people, or twice the population of the U.S., were affected. Fortunately there have been no reports of deaths connected to the blackout, but the loss of power did result in traffic snarls, stranded train passengers and a group of trapped coal miners.

So what can the world’s biggest democracy do to help stave off such wide-sweeping outages in the future? To find out, I spoke with Jason Black, a research leader in grid systems with Battelle’s Energy, Environment and Material Sciences Global Business.

Black characterized India’s power grid as reasonably good on the transmission side, but a bit dodgy on the distribution side. Furthermore, the country has struggled with power shortages as its current generation mix often can’t meet the demands of the population.

“In many sections of the country, they use rolling blackouts regularly,” Black said. “But I don’t think it’s as simple as an excessive load. There are protection schemes in place to deal with that.”

In recent years, India has worked to encourage investment in new power generation of just about every type, including distributed renewable generation like solar energy, of which India now has about 1 GW.

“Traditionally they have used coal, and they have some hydro as well. They have made some legislation that was meant to increase their renewable capacity — just as a way to try to correct some of their power shortages,” he said.

In addition to bringing more generation online, India’s grid operators have attempted to interconnect their grid more thoroughly — an approach not without its dangers.

“[Interconnection is] good from one perspective, because the redundancies can address an interruption in one area. But from another perspective, it can increase the risk of cascading power outages, which it appears this one is.”

Though its transmission grid is reasonably well developed, India’s rapid development and population growth have left it with a distribution system that often falls short of the task of delivering power to those that need it.

“They have had some ongoing problems with electricity theft, which has become a local political problem and leads to losses, making the pull on the system unpredictable. Cleaning up the distribution system would help them a lot,” he said.

For one thing, India’s grid could implement underfrequency load shedding as is done in the U.S.

“In the U.S., we operate our system at 60 Hertz. This keeps the power flowing in sync, so generators don’t trip offline. Imbalances in demand and supply are what cause these kinds of outages — when the generators can’t handle the imbalances. That’s one way to get these cascading power outages,” he said.

To prevent further outages during the restoration process, India’s grid operators need to be careful how they manage the grid in the coming days.

“If you’re a steam plant and the system has tripped off to protect itself, your steam cools off. It can take many hours to return to service. Depending on how many of their generators have black start capability, that process can take a while,” he said.

As generators start spinning again, grid operators have important choices to make.

“There’s a trade off. Do I bring on all my generators, or do I bring on a certain subset of customers that I can get to faster?” he said. “If there isn’t enough slack in the system when you start up these plants, it can bring the system offline again.”

Furthermore, there might be physical damage to the grid that needs fixing — delaying restoration even more.

“There could be parts of the grid that broke… Some transformers that exploded or some circuit breakers that opened. They have to deal with those things before bringing the grid back online,” he said.

Black said this blackout is likely one of the worst in history, in terms of the number of people affected. While Indian officials are still investigating the causes, it bears all the telltale signs of a cascading power outage, like the Northeast blackout of 2003, which began in Ohio, ran through New York and into Canada. But even in a blackout so widespread in North America, only 55 million people were affected. It’s almost unthinkable to most of us to imagine 700 million people without power.

But that’s pretty much how it always goes with power outages, as people in the utility industry know. People don’t think about it at all until the lights go out. Then the next day (hopefully) when they come back on, the finger-wagging starts.

7 Comments on "Fixing the world’s biggest blackout"

BillT on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 2:11 am 



Complexity will bring down the world in the next few decades or less. Every country believes that are immune but they will soon find out they are not.

What will it take in the Us to drop the whole grid for days or weeks or forever? Who knows, but it is coming.

Bernz223 on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 5:14 am 



Shut your God damned as up BillT you fucking old man. Just die already so we can you your resources you useless eater.

BillT on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 5:53 am 



Hahahaha…did I hit a nerve, Bernz? I have another 20 or so years to go and am in perfect health. I’m just spending my retirement following world events and I do not mean the distractions like the Olympics. I mean the real contests going on in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, and the biggest one, in the US of A.

Do I like what I see? Nope! I too have family, kids and grand kids that will have to live in the world coming up. But that does not change reality.

Reality is that the world overall is contracting. Asia is growing on the shrinkage of the Western world. The 5% that live in the 50 states are soon going to be living on 5% or less of the worlds resources instead of 30%+ like they have gotten used to and expect as their ‘right’. Adjust! ^_^

Rick on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 4:14 pm 



BillT, I like reading your comments.

Arthur on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 7:14 pm 



Bernz is angry but somehow is unable to explain what exactly is bothering him. Are you happy, Bernz?

DC on Fri, 3rd Aug 2012 8:49 pm 



How do you investigate too many people chasing too little energy? Or would that be stating the obvious?

Kenz300 on Sun, 5th Aug 2012 3:59 pm 



Over population is part of the problem and reducing population growth will be part of the solution.