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."
It will take months to pinpoint the root cause of failure in India, but Mansoor suspects it is something fairly mundane, such as a failed relay or a grid operator making a mistake. Grids in other countries are prone to the same disruptions, triggered by events such as falling trees and generator breakdowns. And as more solar and wind power joins the generating fleet, it becomes even more challenging to maintain grid stability, since these sources supply power intermittently. Water shortages, too, could increasingly hamper power generation.
The primary function of grid operators is to anticipate load and to maintain a steady balance between power supply and demand. The grid signal operates at a set frequency—60 hertz in the U.S. and 50 hertz in India—and when supply and demand fall out of sync, the frequency will either dip or rise. In the U.S., grid operators have "hot" generators on standby to ramp up power in order to keep a close-to-steady frequency, but that's not the case when generators are routinely maxed out.
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