Soo.... The article suggests that there are roughly 4x40 million = 160 million households in the country, and 1.3 billion people. Divide the one by the other and you get an estimate for the household size of roughly 10 people. That seems rather larger to me, also given the fact that large IT cities like Bangalore are growing like crazy - all with one or two people in an appartment, not 10.
Next, getting 40 million households hooked up to the electricity network for 2.5 billion dollar. Dividing again gives 2500 dollar per 40 households or 60 dollar per house. While labor is cheap in India - this is not going to work.
And indeed: 40 million more housholds (or 300 million more Indians with access to electricity) is not going to do the networks much good...
> It remains to be seen where the power to 'electrify' all households come from and who'll actually foot the bill for the 'free' connections and the lifetime free electricity.'
I don't think the later part of this statement is true, govt is only providing free connection not free electricity.
Also, India is 3rd largest producer of power after China and USA, however it stands 105 when it comes to per capita consumption. The problem in India is not power supply, its the transmission, India hasn't invested much on transmission lines, as a result its paying the price now.
How do you spread non-existent electricity uniformly to all parts of India. Last time I checked 0/anything is 0. Unless you are saying the prime minister has found a way to defeat laws of mathematics or can magically pull out energy out of thin air.
Frankly speaking I wouldn't be surprised if you believe in this too. Given how much this government is about Marketing.
>>so the scheme is about giving them an electricity connection.
The scheme is nothing. They announce these schemes every few years and then junk them, because of the infeasibility of executing projects of this scale.
>>The problem in India is not power supply, its the transmission.
Its more on the generation part. Rolling power cuts are common during summer even in cities.
I don't know what part of the infrastructure is to blame in India, but rolling power cuts can be caused by all parts, not just a lack on the generator side.
Without a sufficient transmission infrastructure, it doesn't matter if the generators even provides 100% of the required energy, some of it will go to waste (or at best: they run at fractional load) and you will still see blackouts simply because the generated energy isn't ending up where it's needed.
Just to nitpick, I don't believe they are called that. Inverters are devices that convert direct current to alternate current. They don't provide power. They just convert the power supplied by batteries to a usable format.
Most people are confusing “power surplus” by countering with “but I still see power cuts”.
Distribution and how a state manages demand and supply also is a huge reason as to how and why power cuts happen.
Only recently did all of India get connected to the national grid.
Once distribution capacity is up, then it is possible to have 24x7 uninterrupted power. Even then, a state’s ability to manage the demand and supply can mean power cuts (e.g., Enron blacking out California even though rest of the equation was all set)
In summer. Bangalore sees 2 - 4 hours of rolling power cuts due to shortage. Your friend needs to supply his secret power surplus into the grid for the benefit of all of us.
Right. I'm talking about how there can be an average surplus and also a peak shortage at the same time.
Articles talking about "power surplus" can't seem to decide if they mean average or peak, and I can't find an official definition of the term.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cxb.powera...
This is a huge problem even now
Where I used to live (in Europe) this sometimes happened , which resulted in power outages, not damage due to safety precautions like sure protectors. But they fixed it when the windmills came along which are quite variable in power delivery and apparently upgraded the net to compensate for this. Haven't had a lot of outages since (changed from about 4-6 times a year to once every 4-6 years).
It sounds like a cheap political hit to me. Just give everyone power and they can say 'we did it' but since it is barely usable nothing has changed.
edit: clarifications
(In most countries you can see a little bit of a frequency dip at times of high demand. It also has the effect of reducing the power draw by synchronous AC motors.)
The frequency is currently 50.034Hz, at some point it will be below 50Hz to keep the average at 50Hz.
When the frequency drops below 50Hz, it suggests that demand is outpacing supply, and vice-versa when the frequency is above 50Hz.
Grid voltage can vary due to your location and all sorts of factors, but frequency is, of course, always synchronised wherever you are.
National Grid pays a lot of money for "frequency response" to ensure the grid remains balanced. Traditionally this was provided largely by coal spinning reserve. But as most coal-fired plants have now closed, it's now provided by diesel farms (yuck!) and increasingly, battery storage.
http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/services/balancing-services/...
In the US frequency response is mostly Nat Gas powered. There are new projects that are battery based, but another way to achieve this is on the demand side, by requesting non critical loads to turn off or throttle themselves when the frequency drops too low. I think this is being done at an industrial scale (i.e aluminium smelters) but it is possible on the domestic scale also with EVs electric tank water heaters, etc.
Going forward, given the intermittency of renewable energy, these methods (primarily storage) will be more important as the energy supply becomes more variable.
I'm not sure about other utility companies, but when I was a TSO we never did this. For the most part, AGC worked fine to maintain frequency.
General Topic: http://www.pnnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_rep... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890416...
HVAC Demand/Response: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7407597/?reload=true
Aluminum Smelter Demand Response: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1836&c...
> "Autonomous Demand Response for frequency regulation is real..."
I wasn't saying that ADR wasn't "real," just that it's not something we're currently doing for frequency control in actual practice...and of course that might change as engineers continue researching and pushing the field further. It definitely looks like ADR solutions are on the horizon though.
As a former Transmission System Operator I can tell you the most likely scenario you see this is when generation trips offline (demand exceeds supply for a short time).
I've sat in an Arizona control room, 1700MW of NW hydro would trip offline and we'd see a massive drop in interconnect frequency.
It is strange that voltage drops in the night. Go figure, I thought in the night there is usually overgeneration.
I've also spent several years in tier two cities, where 8-10 hour power cuts are part of normal life and smaller towns where a failure can cause week-long power cut. I know with surety that large parts of the National Capital Region (NCR) have massive power cuts. Housing societies and businesses run large diesel generators charging 3-4x the normal rate and causing immense pollution.
This is only half the story, the story of low power supply. Then there is power theft. I don't have exact figures but when I used to go to the billing office for paying our meager bill of a few hundred rupees, I saw pending bills of hundred of thousands rupees. People hadn't paid their bills for decades. Occasionally there would be raids and the defaulters' power would be disconnected, then they would hook up to the power lines illegally for some time and then get the connections back under some amnesty scheme.
It remains to be seen where the power to 'electrify' all households come from and who'll actually foot the bill for the 'free' connections and the lifetime free electricity.