As we ended the month of July in 2012, India was in the midst of a blackout that left an estimated 650 million people without power, In fact, 20 of India's 28 states were plunged into darkness. Why did this happen?
It all happened because of an aging electrical infrastructure with relatively few back-up power generating systems combined with rapid economic growth that has dramatically increased the need for energy. In other words, there is not enough energy production to satisfy current, not to mention future, energy demands. And, from an energy transmission and distribution perspective, there have been problems for years due to the aging infrastructure and now with demand increasing every day, small problems can become large very fast. Could anyone have seen these problems coming and prevented them from happening in the first place?
As you might guess, the answer is yes. The vast majority of problems individuals, organizations, and nations face are fully predictable, but we are all too busy focusing on our current problems that we have little time allocated to focus on solving tomorrow's predictable problems today.
Over the next five years there will be roughly five billion people entering the lower middle class in rapidly developing economies such as India, China and Indonesia -- they will all want and need a lot of power.
Looking at India today in the blackout zone, (where 650 million people were without power) there are many more in that same zone who never had power to begin with -- and they too will want power soon. For example, in one of the blackout zones in Bihar, only 16.4 percent of the 100 million people who live in that area have access to electricity. However in Punjab, a rapidly growing area a little to the west, 96.6% of the people have access to power. Overall, one-third of India's households don't have access to electricity, according to a 2011 census. So the use of electricity in India is unevenly dispersed. But that will change very quickly.
Will India have more blackout problems if they don't act quickly to solve tomorrow's predictable problem today? You know the answer is yes once again.
Why isn't China having a similar problem? Well, China does have energy demand problems and infrastructure problems. However, India is a democracy and China is not. So when someone in India wants to put in a power plant or build a dam or do something similar, there's voting that takes place and politics. For example, when China wants to build a gigantic hydroelectric dam, it's just done, whether you like it or not. I'm not saying China's way is better than a democracy. I'm just saying it makes things happen faster.
But rapidly growing power demands aren't just overseas. Even in the United States, our energy infrastructure is aging rapidly. Utilities have already started converting to a smart grid, but politics are involved which slows things down and as a nation we have to ask, are we keeping up with our own expanding energy needs? After all, if we have smart phones, smart tablets, smart TVs, smart roads, and smart buildings, it doesn't make sense to be plugging them into a dumb grid. So it's not just the developing world that needs to move faster at converting its infrastructure. The developed world needs to catch up too.
As we look to the predictable future and see what is taking place in terms of technological transformation, growing energy needs, and the rapid economic upward mobility of billions of people going from poverty to lower-class and lower-middle class, we need to be anticipatory, solve tomorrow's predictable problems today, not reactionary, focusing only on current problems. We need to work together with a new sense of urgency. We need to be preparing not only in developing countries for rapidly increasing predictable demand, but also turning our sights to our own country. We need not only a smart grid, but also a grid that's capable of getting smarter every day, as our devices get smarter, so it can adapt and bring us successfully into the 21st century.
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Absolutely nothing. We already know how to balance our electrical power generation capacity with demand.
As for your "political" analysis... that's ridiculous. The differences in infrastructure between China and India are driven by economic development, not by the political system. The US and all of Europe are democracies. Based on your argument we should be having blackouts similar to India.
Right now, the US is ramping up for its next war to waste wealth with Iran.
If Americans actually cared about their future they woudl ...
- stop all wars and not start any more. Just spend a few weeks to pack up all the military stuff in Afghanistan and ship it all home. They hit Israel up side the head with a metal baseball bat and tell them to shut up, sit down and leave Iran alone. Then keep hitting Israel until they obey. Also open free trade agreements with Iran so Iran doesn't feel the need to prepare for war with the US.
- Completely remove all US military from around the world. There is no need for hte US to "police" the world.
- Cut the military budget by 75%.
- US the money removed from the military to rebuild the US energy infrastructure to use non-oil/gas energy so when (not if) Global Peak Oil hits the US will be energy self sufficient.
BUT ...
Given that the US was told 45 years ago that it needed to get off oil energy and has strenuously avoided any attempt to do that, I expect that the US will just let its energy infrastructure deteriorate.
The best lessons to learn from this powr failure, in addition to how to mitigate it, would be to see how much suffering in pain and death was caused by it and what steps should be taken to minimize this. Countries should create disaster recovery plans for this. The countries should assess their other vulnerabilities when events like this occur.
Hmmm... is that why we can't get anything done in Washington while the Chinese have basically changed their whole system about once in a decade over the past 30 years?
Interesting...
:-)
OR PRACTICE CHINA STYLE BIRTH CONTROL----TOO MANY SOULS-TOO LITTLE MEGA-WATTS....
this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what our government is doing, which is permanently industrializing millions more acres of wilderness for Big Solar, Big Wind and Big Transmission, so we can have a far LESS reliable, far MORE expensive electrical grid that maintains the Big Energy monopolies and denies us energy democracy, jobs, improved property values and participation in the energy economy as more than Big Energy ATMs.
Every day there is another terrifying report exposing how vulnerable our grid is (the DoD is going off our grid for the most part now, and the Climate Change report CA just released said that adding more Big Transmission is the worst option to avoid and mitigate climate change), and how critical biodiversity, migration corridors, sequestration and conservation is, but the bulldozers are revving up and there is an unholy alliance between Big Energy, Big Government and the Big Enviro greenwashers trying to make it all look "smart from the start."
we need to reverse course immediately or the economic and environmental consequences will be devastating.
Boo!