“Factories and workshops across India were up and running Wednesday after major electrical grid collapses caused the world’s two worst power blackouts.
An estimated 620 million people lost state-provided electricity when India’s northern, eastern and northeastern grids failed Tuesday afternoon. It followed Monday’s failure of the northern grid, which left 370 million people powerless.
Electricity workers struggled throughout the day Tuesday to return power to the 20 affected states, restoring most of the system within hours of the failure. India’s new Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters that by Wednesday morning power had been fully restored across the country.
“Factories and workshops across India were up and running Wednesday after major electrical grid collapses caused the world’s two worst power blackouts.
An estimated 620 million people lost state-provided electricity when India’s northern, eastern and northeastern grids failed Tuesday afternoon. It followed Monday’s failure of the northern grid, which left 370 million people powerless.
Electricity workers struggled throughout the day Tuesday to return power to the 20 affected states, restoring most of the system within hours of the failure. India’s new Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters that by Wednesday morning power had been fully restored across the country.
Moily, who took over the top power ministry position Tuesday, said an investigation had begun and he did not want to point fingers or speculate about the cause.”
And this:
“The Confederation of Indian Industry said the two outages cost business hundreds of millions of dollars, though they did not affect the financial center of Mumbai and the global outsourcing powerhouses of Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south.”
Comment:
The whole things is so bizarre, not the least, because everyone seems to be taking it so coolly. The relative calmness of the population was really quite admirable. Half of India doesn’t have access to electricity and those that do are used to black-outs of smaller dimensions.
What I get from everything I’ve read so far:
1. No one really knows what happened.
2. It was the power-grid in the NE Northern grid that went down first. The NE area is where there were violent riots and communal clashes involving the Bodo tribes. Thousands were displaced. No one really knows why the rioting began. The area is very strategically positioned close to Burma and China and also near the drug trade. [Correction, August 3: I read that it was around Delhi that the grid first went down. It must have been misreported. I’ll research this a bit more.]
3. Just last month the government talked about the importance of defending against a major cyber-attack against public utilities and also tasked one agency to engage in surveillance preparatory to preemptive attack, if needed.
4. Recently, there was also a cyberattack on the Vishakhapatnam naval HQ on the east coast.
5. Power seems to have been restored very fast, all in all. This argues against the failure being simply a bigger version of “business as usual.” While rolling brown-outs and even black-outs are common throughout India, this is the biggest electricity outage in history, and the biggest India has suffered since 2001.
6. I am not sure whether those grids are modern “smart grids.” Until one knows more about the grid, it would be misleading to suggest a cyberattack, unless there were other computerized systems that could trigger such a big collapse.
Several groups stand to profit from an outage of this kind:
1. Groups wanting to sell the government and public on smart grids (very vulnerable to attack unless properly encrypted).
2. Groups pushing for alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear power. Nuclear plants under construction in India have been met by fierce opposition from anti-nuclear activists.
3. Groups that see a need for other sources of energy, such as natural gas (the NE has large natural gas deposits).
4. Groups that want to hype a terror threat would make increased surveillance easier to sell to the public.
5. Groups that want to set back the economy or highlight its weaknesses for whatever purpose, whether to encourage reforms, push them through at a higher rate, or destroy them.
6. A government “dry-run” or preparedness exercise of some kind is also a possibility. Perhaps others governments are involved. Who knows? These days, nothing seems to be outlandish any more.