Half the country was without power yesterday (31st July 2012) and day before in the biggest blackout the world has ever seen. Three regional power grids collapsed from too much demand, leaving miners trapped underground, metro services at a halt and people sweltering in the summer heat. Power outages can happen at any time. Power outages can result from many different occurrences and events, including storms, natural disasters, animals, motor vehicle accidents and planned outages. It is a statistical fact that approximately 70% of all power outages across the U.S. are caused by weather-related events, such as thunderstorms, ice storms, heavy winds and lightning strikes, as well as other natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
Power grid is archaic in India, part of the problem with the grid is also the lack of automation and maintenance. Many of us know that there is considerable leakage of power thru illegal tapping. Transmission efficiency improvement is another issue. Improvements in this area can easily restore & solve about 10 to 15% of the power demands and projects like R-APDRP should be implemented properly to improve the situation.
Biggest problem is huge T&D losses mainly due to power theft and misuse. Theft (of all types) represent a psychological problem (not just socio-economic as propounded by many analysts) that can be tackled only thru strict rules and regulations. Political indifference to this problem, and rampant power theft by industries in connivance to electricity department are the biggest reasons for the continued mess. Even huge investments done in the name of feeder renovation programe launched with APDRP have not resulted in any tangible improvement. Along with technical solutions socio-psychological approach is also desirable. Perfect energy accounting, auditing and pin pointing responsibility for unreasonable energy losses/leakage is primary requirement. People's participation is proved and powerful tool to address the problem.
In fact, Indian power grid is still not ready for a smart grid project. We need a reliable and uninterrupted power not just to those shopping malls, multiplexes and IT parks but to the needy farmers in those drought hit areas where currently the crop cannot sustain because the water cannot be pumped to the farms in time due to power shortage for almost 12 hours every day. Many argue that Smart-Grid is quite uneconomical compared to the cost of integrating smart-grid equipment to decades old grids. Many consider Smart-Grid as an incapable innovation especially with the conventional system of power Generation, Transmission and Distribution. Instead, microgrids with distributed power generation are the answer to a country with huge population. The design & implementation model there is going to be quite different from what is being done in the US. Microgrids will be less prone to terrorist/security threats and also to blackouts.
Remember, Smartgrids, won’t prevent an outage, but they might allow you to restore things more quickly. Smart grid would definitely help in balancing demand vs. supply, establishing interoperability and thus improving efficiency, if the proper policies are enforced and required infrastructure is develop.
