FSTDT Forums
Community => Politics and Government => Topic started by: Fpqxz on July 31, 2012, 05:11:33 pm
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From the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19060279):
After an outage yesterday which left 370 million people in the northern states in the dark, an even worse outage has occurred today:
Hundreds of millions of people have been left without electricity in northern and eastern India after a massive power breakdown.
More than half the country was hit by the power cuts after three grids collapsed - one for a second day.
Hundreds of trains have come to a standstill and hospitals are running on backup generators.
The country's power minister has blamed the crisis on states drawing too much power from the national grid.
The breakdowns in the northern, eastern, and north-eastern grids mean around 600m people have been affected in 20 of India's states.
India's demand for electric power has outstripped the capabilities of its grids and powerplants. This, coupled with high demand due to heat and drought, have put half the nation's population in the dark.
Wikipedia is already listing this as the worst blackout in history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages) in terms of number of customers affected.
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Scary shit, and a good reason to make modernizing old infastructure a goal in any nation.
Also a really good reason to focus on short term power solutions until we get a fusion generator or 20 up and running. Or at least something better, that's practical. Won't be to long till this kind of thing could happen in much of the industrialized world. Particularly the US.
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Scary shit, and a good reason to make modernizing old infastructure a goal in any nation.
Also a really good reason to focus on short term power solutions until we get a fusion generator or 20 up and running. Or at least something better, that's practical. Won't be to long till this kind of thing could happen in much of the industrialized world. Particularly the US.
The Indian government has announced some bold plans for improvement of the electrical sector, including the usage of thorium-based nuclear power plants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three_stage_nuclear_power_programme). Unfortunately, the economic realities in the country hasn't quite caught up to the grandiose visions of India's ruling class.
I have a lot of respect for the Indians. If anything, I admire their ambition and emphasis on education--two ideals which have long since been lost in the USA. But it is clear that they will need to make improving the energy sector a top priority in order to continue on the path to becoming a major world power.
TL;DR--India must construct additional pylons. Literally.
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Apparently NY needs more fucking pylons too, just lost power for about 2 hours.
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I think its safe to say the industrialized world in its entirety needs to build additional pylons.
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There are daily power outages in almost all Indian cities, only Mumbai and New Delhi get uninterrupted power.
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So... if that's happening to India, how long until we see more of that in the US? It's not like we treat our infrastructure all that well over here...
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So... if that's happening to India, how long until we see more of that in the US? It's not like we treat our infrastructure all that well over here...
I mentioned this a few months back (http://forums.fstdt.net/politics-and-government/u-s-electrical-grid-is-falling-apart/). The fact is, while India is at least planning to expand electrical production and capacity, we aren't even doing that. So when the antiquated U.S. grid falls apart, don't say you weren't warned.