A 600-million-person blackout lays
out the severity and scope of India's
grid challenges. Microgrids and solar
power could help.
JEFF ST. JOHN: JULY 31, 2012
The only good thing about India's
daily blackouts is that when there's a
truly massive power outage, people
are prepared for it.
Thus, when the power went out
across eight northern Indian states
early Monday morning, leaving some
370 million people in the dark, most
of the critical facilities -- Delhi's
international airport, hospitals and
police stations, large-scale commercial
and industrial power users and
higher-end homes and apartments --
were ready to go with backup
generators.
But everyday people were stuck with
no light, no heat, and no public
transportation. Traffic jams snarled
thoroughfares without traffic lights,
rail commuters were stuck in stalled
electric trains, and small businesses
had to close.
Then, on Tuesday, things got worse,
with a 20-state blackout that cut
power for anywhere between 620
million and 680 million people --
about half of India's population, or
twice the number of people now
living in the United States. This time
around, some hospitals lost power,
and coal miners were trapped by
stalled equipment. Only about 40
percent of power was back up by mid-
afternoon.
And while Monday's outage was tied
to demand outstripping supply, the
government was still "absolutely
clueless why this has happened
again," Shakti Sinha, principal
secretary in the power department of
the Delhi government, told The
Washington Post of Tuesday's
outage. Power Minister Sushil Kumar
Shinde blamed the new crisis on
states taking more than their allotted
share of electricity, and other officials
said grid faults were likely to blame,
but didn't know where they were or
how many may have occurred.
India's Grid in Dire Need of Repair
Could smart grid technologies help
solve the problems that caused these
blackouts? We'll have to wait for the
official inquiry to come up with what
went wrong before we can start
answering that question -- though it's
likely that more grid monitors and
sensors could make that fault
detection task easier.
Beyond that, however, there's a world
of work to do. India's grid is a mess,
with money-losing economics, daily
power outages, and technical and
non-technical power losses (i.e.,
inefficiency and theft) that add up to
20 percent to 50 percent of all power
generated, compared to the United
States' (almost all technical) losses of
7 percent or so.
Like the United States and China,
more than half of India's power
comes from coal-fired power plants,
but in India's case, it hasn't been able
to get enough coal lately, which has
driven up prices. Meanwhile, a lack of
rain has left the country's
hydroelectric dams -- some 19 percent
of its generation mix -- without the
water they need to generate power.
Overall, India's peak power demand
has been outstripping supply by
about 9 percent during the latest
summer peaks, when air conditioning,
a mark of an upwardly mobile
lifestyle, starts to kick in.
All of that inefficiency and waste has a
price. The Wall Street Journal reports
that India's poor infrastructure
consistently shaves about 2 percent
from its annual GDP growth. India's
fast-growing technology sector has
had to build its own power plants,
essentially, to make sure facilities don't
break down or sit idle. Most of that
backup power comes from diesel
generators, which are inefficient and
pollute the neighborhoods they run
in.
Smart Grid From the Bottom Up
But at the same time, all that backup
power could be one key to unlocking
India's smart grid potential. Indeed,
microgrids -- islands of power
generation and consumption that can
run themselves, or maybe help the
grid when it's stressed -- are how
India's grid is going to get smart, at
least in the short term.
Microgrids can range from showcase
technical campuses like Cisco and
Wipro's Lavasa City "e-city" project
outside Mumbai, to commercial-scale
business offerings like the one
Echelon is doing in a high-end
residential development in
Hyderabad. Most of India's
commercial and industrial buildings
have backup power of some kind.
Adding metering and control
capabilities could help justify drawing
that power more often -- perhaps
preemptively to avoid stress during
peak demand times.
It's important to remember that the
level of organization of projects like
these is strictly 'behind the meter.'
The economics of backup power
require customers to worry about
their own reliability first. Using them to
help the grid solve its problems is, for
now, awaiting more development on
the utility side of the smart grid, Varun
Nagaraj, Echelon's senior vice
president of product management,
told me earlier this year.
Right now the mood is cautious for
the grid giants working in India. IBM
launched a big smart grid planning
analytics system for the government's
Bureau of Energy Efficiency last year,
and Guru Banavar, CTO of IBM's
Global Public Sector unit, told me this
week that IBM is working with utilities
in Delhi and elsewhere in India.
Still, "we've not reached the front
where there's a big information
technology breakthrough," he said.
That's mainly because the grid is so
old and decrepit that it needs a
massive government-led investment
to get it up to speed. "At a campus
level, there's a lot more action going
on," he said, with IBM taking part in
"Smart City" developments with a host
of Indian governments.
Some grid projects are underway. In
March, Siemens announced an 18.5
million euro ($24.3 million) contract to
provide SCADA and distribution
management systems for eight cities
in the Indian state of Maharashtra,
including Mumbai. The idea is to give
the grid sensors and communications
to detect faults, direct outage repairs
and spot power theft, among other
functions. Indian IT giants like Wipro,
Infosys, HCL and TCS are deploying
technology to support solar power
arrays, campus-wide microgrids and
the like.
But a grand-scale (read: billions of
dollars) effort to tie India's six grids
together hasn't been forthcoming,
despite the formation of various
central government forums and task
forces. In March, a government
consortium announced plans for
$100 million in grants for smart grid
projects. But since then, the
government has scaled back its
promise for $1 trillion in general
infrastructure improvements, leaving
the fate of the smart grid funding
unclear.
Solar Power to the Rescue?
In the meantime, India's potential to
become the next hot solar power
market may be cut short by an
inadequate grid infrastructure. Dr.
Murray Cameron, COO of Phoenix
Solar AG, told us in May that India's
high-voltage grid was relatively stable,
making large-scale solar farm
integration tenable. But the "low-
voltage grid is in a sad state [and] the
medium-voltage grid is shaky," he
said.
Perhaps solar-equipped microgrids
could help solve the problem. India is
emerging as a hotbed for off-grid
solar power, with the potential for
installing more than 1 gigawatt per
year by 2016, according to GTM
Research and Bridge to India. More
than a third of the country lacks
electricity at all, making rural
micropower projects a big target.
But hospitals, factories, government
buildings and apartment blocks could
also generate their own power to help
shave a portion of their power use,
and thus cut down on peak overloads
like the one suspected of causing this
week's disaster. Adding solar to a mix
of generation, demand response and
energy storage systems could make
those systems self-supporting.
India's government wants to boost
solar power from today's 1,000
megawatts to 20,000 megawatts by
2022. Still, solar's economics face
challenges in India, including a split
between state government incentives
for power and the prices that power is
actually bought and sold at on the
nation's grid system, as The
Economist pointed out in an April
article. Whether solar power as a
microgrid backup, rather than a grid
resource, can make the economics
work is a more difficult question to
answer.
