When the lights go out...

[svizzerams]

620,000,000 in India with the power grid kaputsky....that is like every man woman child and the dogs and cats x 2 w/o power in all of these United States. Discuss.

[nanuq]

Something to get used to as aging power infrastructures get older and more unreliable.

[Texas Carnie Roadshow]

But who will provide tech support?

[svizzerams]

Exactly.

Oh...I think I see the problem...

[Farmdog]

NPR's account this evening whitled away over 50% of production to falty infrastructure and theft. They refused US aid following the Tsunami, I'll throw up in my hat if I see some yuppy twit trying to put a solar panel on a crumbling building durring a monsoon.

[Kurt]

I was doing some serious chin stroking ( I can no longer stroke anything while thinking thanks to court ordered Depo Provera implants) over this one.

The part that stood out to me was that the Government controls the power grid and the outage was caused by "States taking more than their quota". That would mean that if the Indian government can monitor power requests to know who the culprit is, then it would have been possible to anticipate and throttle those requests as well. When one part of a power grid requests too much power you give them a "brown out" or "rolling blackouts". Even the simplest power transmission & accounting system can do this (if their reason is the correct one and it might not be) and modern (after 1972) SCADA systems can do it easily.

So, either the grid is hopeless or the people running it are useless and corrupt. I am thinking that bribes were given to give some areas excess power which would be easy to do given the Indian government's centralized control over the power grid.

[Farmdog]

I'm thinking mega corruption is probably at the root. What ever happened to the Naxalite rebels who used to crash the grid?

[Kurt]

I'm thinking mega corruption is probably at the root. What ever happened to the Naxalite rebels who used to crash the grid?

My favorite name for rebels because they sound like they are a material used to make countertops in the 1960's that somehow attained sentience and revolted.

[ktrout]

I'm thinking mega corruption is probably at the root. What ever happened to the Naxalite rebels who used to crash the grid?

My favorite name for rebels because they sound like they are a material used to make countertops in the 1960's that somehow attained sentience and revolted.

I for one welcome our Formica overlords!

[Farmdog]

You know, you sure are a group of goofy bastards.