Systems failure

NEW YEAR'S DAY was not the first time that a power grid collapsed and caused an extensive and extended blackout. Less than a year ago there was a similar failure in the northern grid and long- drawn-out power failures have taken place in the other regions of the country as well. The Union Power Ministry has ordered an enquiry into the most recent collapse, the Central Electricity Authority has called a meeting of the heads of the regional utilities and the Central Government generating companies to pinpoint responsibility for the power failure while the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission is to hold a public enquiry into the January 1 blackout. This is all very well but given the record of the recent past it is difficult to see the utilities learning more from the latest episode than they have from the previous ones.

The whole idea of a power grid is to match the generation of power with its consumption in a wider area and to distribute the power produced by the Central Government utilities. But the frequency with which the regional grids are collapsing suggests that a new problem is being created even as the old one of a mismatch between generation and consumption has been tackled. This was graphically illustrated in the failure of the northern grid where unlike in previous instances the proximate cause of tripping was not an over-drawal of power in one area but the failure of generating stations to adhere to the load despatch schedule that had been provided to them. The consequent collapse at one sub-station near the Capital caused a tripping of lines all over the grid. The one indicates a failure of management and the other an inability to sequester the collapse to one area of the grid. There are two fundamental prerequisites for discipline in electricity grids. One is that there should not be an over- drawal of power and the other is that generating stations should stick to load despatch schedules. Violation of the second condition is a relatively new phenomenon and as the blackout earlier this week has shown it can cause just as much damage as the more common event of an over-drawal of power. However, even the spread of this problem could and should have been contained by isolating the tripping of power lines. That this did not happen suggests either an absence of the systems necessary to isolate the blackout or another kind of management failure. The full story of the blackout is yet to be revealed. But it is more than likely that with all the attention being paid to boosting generating capacity the demands of maintaining and improving the transmission and distribution system have been ignored - in which case the prediction must be of more grid collapses in the near future until the investment necessary to sequester failures is made.

In addition to the blackout that lasted for close to 20 hours what was glaring about the event was the complete failure of the so-called disaster management plan for New Delhi that is supposed to deal with precisely such an eventuality. It was not just the VVIP areas of the Capital that were bereft of power. Health, water and fire control services completely broke down in New Delhi with not even a semblance of skeletal services in operation. If this is what happens during a blackout in the capital of a country that claims to be a nuclear weapon state one shudders to think what will happen in the event of a bigger disaster.

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