India's power back on, for now
Stranded passengers stand near empty railway tracks as they wait for train services to resume at a railway station in New Delhi, India, July 31, 2012. / AP
(CBS/AP) NEW DELHI - India's top electricity official says power has been restored across the country after a major system collapse led to the worst blackout in history.
An estimated 620 million people were without power after India's northern, eastern and northeastern grids cascaded into failure Tuesday afternoon.
Electricity workers struggled throughout the day to get power back to the 20 affected states. They restored most of the system in the hours after the crash. (Click at left for a full report on the outages)Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters Wednesday morning that power had been fully restored.
The government has ordered an investigation into what caused the crisis.
Moily said he did not want to point fingers. Other officials said the crisis might have been caused by states drawing too much power from the grid but some analysts dismissed that explanation.
"I just can't believe that there is no system in place to check whether the states are drawing more than their limit or not," said Samiran Chakraborty, head of research at Standard Chartered, a financial services company. "There has to be a much more technical answer to that question."
At a contentious news conference, R.N. Nayak, chairman of Power Grid Corp., which runs the nation's power system, said his staff was searching for the cause of the problem and pleaded for patience.
"We have been running this grid for decades. ... Please trust us," he said.
The blackouts came amid consumer anger with the recent increase in power fees, including a 26 percent hike in Delhi, that government officials said were needed to pay for the steep rise in fuel costs.
The Confederation of Indian Industry said the two outages cost business hundreds of millions of dollars, though they did not affect the financial center of Mumbai and the global outsourcing powerhouses of Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south. Like many, the group demanded a widespread reform of India's power sector, which has been unable to keep up with the soaring demand for electricity as the economy expanded and Indians grew more affluent and energy hungry.
"India has outgrown its own infrastructure," said Jagannadham Thunuguntla, a strategist at SMC Global Securities.
India's Central Electricity Authority reported power deficits of more than 8 percent in recent months, and many economists said the power deficit is dragging down India's economy.
"Without power we cannot run an economy at 8 percent, 9 percent growth or whatever your ambition is," Chakraborty said.
Part of the problem is that India relies on coal for more than half its power generation and the coal supply is controlled by a near state monopoly that is widely considered a shambles.
A recent survey showed nearly all the coal-fueled plants had less than seven days of coal stock, a critical level, said Chakraborty, and many of the country's power plants were running below capacity. Government bureaucracy has made it difficult to bring more plants online.
In addition, vast amounts of power bleeds out of India's antiquated distribution system or is pirated through unauthorized wiring. Farmers, with a guarantee of free electricity that is driving many state electric boards to bankruptcy, have no incentive to conserve energy.
The power deficit was worsened this year by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation, spurred farmers to use pumps to irrigate their fields long after the rains would normally have come and kept temperatures higher, keeping air conditioners and fans running longer.
While Indians were furious and embarrassed, many took the crisis in stride, inured by the constant - though far less widespread - outages triggered by the huge electricity deficit stymieing the development of this would-be Asian power.
"The blackout might have been huge, but it wasn't unbearably long," said Satish, the owner of a coffee and juice shop in central Delhi who uses only one name. "It was just as bad as any other five-hour power cut. We just used a generator while the light was out, and it was work as usual."
Popular on CBSNews.com
- Iran hangs alleged U.S., Israeli spies
- North Korea fires short-range missiles for second day
- Russia shows accused U.S. spy heading home
- Photos of the Week 21 Photos
- Two imprisoned over killing Malcolm X's grandson
- Plane catches fire on Moscow runway Play Video
- N. Korea fires 5th projectile into sea
- Russia strikes back after expelling alleged U.S. spy
louiville, wake the hell up before we 'liberals' smack you awake. There are many conservatives who have been taken in by the lie of global warming as well as liberals.
If the Republicans have their way, we wouldn't go back to the Stone Ages..... we would just be choking to death on the soot-filled, can't see two inches in front of your ******* face air!
----------------------------------------------------------
Really? Man are you misinformed FYI it was Nixon who started the EPA, it was Reagan who signed SARA (Superfund Act) to clean up the messes. Clinton plundered the Act to go to Somalia and Hati but hey he put some wolves in Yellowstone whhho hoooo.
Lerianis4 another democrat union educated misinformed democrat getting his real education late in life...
louiville, totally wrong. The problem is that the electric companies are not REQUIRED to put X percentage of their massive profits back into improving infrastructure.
Also, 99% of power outages could be stopped simply by? BURYING POWER LINES! No more trees taking them down in bad storms.
-----------------------------------------------------
FYI "Underground vs. Overhead Power Lines"
"Reliability
Most measures of electric reliability focus on two metrics: the frequency with which a
customer sustains a power outage (# of power outages/year) and the duration of power
outages (minutes/year a customer is without power). Five years of underground and
overhead reliability comparisons for North Carolina's investor-owned electric utilities - Duke
Energy, Progress Energy and Dominion - found that the frequency of outages on underground
systems was 50% less than for overhead systems, but the average duration of an
underground outage was 58% longer. Because those repair times are typically much longer,
customers served by underground lines are usually among the last to have power restored.
Long term reliability is also an issue. As underground lines get older, they become less
reliable. In fact, a Maryland utility found that customers served by 40-year-old overhead lines
had better reliability than those served by 20-year-old underground lines.
Cost
Before discussing the cost of placing lines underground, it's important to understand the
difference between distribution and transmission lines. Transmission lines are high-voltage
lines carrying power from generation plants to substations. From the substations, the voltage
is reduced and sent out into neighborhoods through lower voltage distribution lines.
The cost to place new transmission lines underground is about 8 to 10 times the cost to build
overhead lines. The cost to build underground distribution lines is typically four to six times
the cost of underground distribution lines.
Placing existing overhead lines underground is also an expensive proposition. Preliminary
estimates compiled by SCE&G suggest that it would cost more than $24 billion to place its
existing overhead distribution lines underground. The North Carolina Utilities Commission
studied the cost of placing Duke Power's distribution facilities underground and found it would
cost more than $41 billion, resulting in a 125 percent increase in customer rates."
http://www.sceg.com/NR/rdonlyres/465E6534-2FFB-4069-BF84-81465AEEF887/0/%20Undergroundvs.pdf,
This could be a problem, if something is free, it can be used wastefully. They might restructure that to allow the farmer to decide what tax breaks they get on power, versus other goods and services they need.
So you have a weak monsoon making less rain with less hydroelectric, less cooling with more air conditioners and less rain so farmers pump water with free electricity. Sounds like a formula for a power failure.
If the Republicans have their way, we wouldn't go back to the Stone Ages..... we would just be choking to death on the soot-filled, can't see two inches in front of your ******* face air!
OH and if having the government run the electrical grid is such a great idea then why is India doing so poorly since the Indian government own 80% of the power generation there... Hmmmmmm?
Also, 99% of power outages could be stopped simply by? BURYING POWER LINES! No more trees taking them down in bad storms.
India is just more honest and open about what they do.