India blackout leaves 370 million in dark

[Dr Powerfun]

NEW DELHI (AP) — Northern India's power grid crashed Monday, halting hundreds of trains, forcing hospitals and airports to use backup generators and leaving 370 million people — more than the population of the United States and Canada combined — sweltering in the summer heat.

The blackout, one of the worst to hit India in a decade, highlighted the nation's inability to feed a growing hunger for energy as it strives to become a regional economic power.

The country's northern grid crashed about 2:30 a.m. because it could no longer keep up with the huge demand for power in the hot summer, officials in the state of Uttar Pradesh said. However, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said he was not sure exactly what caused the collapse and had formed a committee to investigate it.

Full story at news.yahoo.com

[Judee]

Interesting, as according to this, they're blaming the outage on too much 'over-regulation'. Seems to be a common problem with countries throughout the world these days. Government has its greedy self-serving hands in everybody's pockets these days. We elect, hire, and pay fellow citizens to 'represent' us, and they end up 'representing themselves' and no one else!

Ref.no.: PW-20120730-35975-IND

Situation Update No. 1
On 2012-07-30

Event: Power Outage
Location: India Multiple areas Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir

India’s worst power grid failure in a decade cut electricity supplies to nearly 360 million people in seven northern states today, shutting transport networks, triggering commuter chaos and halting water supplies. About 50 percent of the system has been restored and the remainder should resume in 3 to 4 hours after all generation plants start functioning, V.V. Sharma, a general manager with the systems operation unit of Power Grid Corp. (PWGR) of India, said by phone. The company is analyzing what went wrong, Sharma said. Businesses across much of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan states, had to turn to generators, while services on New Delhi’s metro and Indian railways were suspended for several hours. Traffic signals failed, jamming roads. “This again highlights how poor infrastructure remains the biggest drag on the Indian economy,” said D.H. Pai Panandiker, president of R PG Foundation, an economic policy group based in New Delhi, who stayed home because his office doesn’t have any electricity. “The power sector remains too over-regulated. Unless private companies are allowed greater involvement, the problems are going to remain.” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is seeking to secure $400 billion of investment in the power sector in the next five years as he targets an additional 76,000 megawatts in generation by 2017. India has missed every annual target to add electricity- production capacity since 1951.