Outage in India Could Be a Harbinger for the Rest of the World
India’s electric grid is particularly challenged in keeping up with its economy, but grids around the world are at risk from growing complexity and conflicts between water and power.
An estimated 670 million Indians were affected by this week’s grid outage (see “How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided”). But it would be a mistake to think that India is uniquely vulnerable to large-scale grid failures. The growing complexity and reliance on the electric grid in both developed and fast-growing countries is making stability tougher to achieve.
India, in particular, operates its grid with one very large handicap: insufficient power. With demand for electricity regularly outstripping supply, grid operators ration out power by periodically cutting service in some areas. The situation has been made worse this year by a drier monsoon season, which has prompted northern farmers to run pumps and draw more power than usual.
Few, if any, countries suffer the same gaping mismatch between power need and availability. But India’s disaster illustrates the perils of relying on manual control of the grid as these systems get overtaxed and more complicated. To make grids around the world more reliable, operators need to incorporate more advanced control technology, which can help grids recover gracefully from disruptions.
“Any complex interactive system is prone to break up. You can minimize the risk, but you can never prevent a failure,” says Arshad Mansoor, senior vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute. “Saying the reason for India’s gridwide collapse was that they had more load than generation is too simplistic.”