India has experienced two separate power grid failures in 24 hours. [source]
The first power grid collapse, on Monday, was the country’s worst blackout in a decade. It affected seven states in northern India that are home to more than 350 million people. [source]
The second power outage resulted when three power grids failed. This time, the power outage spread across 20 of India’s 28 states and over 620 million people were impacted — a population twice the size of the entire United States. [source]
The recent power outage in India is serious, and no doubt has inconvenienced many. Yet, India is resilient, and through advanced sustainability technologies and parallel service models that continue uninterrupted even off-the-grid, they will fair much better in adverse circumstances than another country with a similar outage. For example, if the entire U.S. was without power for an extended period of time, many services would not be able to continue.
Many countries, like India, have hybrid systems in place whereby the power can be discontinued for short periods of time during peak loads. This results in an entire nation-wide infrastructure that allows things to “continue as normal” during short power outages.
However, countries with an infrastructure that depends on electrical power to be present 100% of the time are not as able to function properly during an unplanned power outage. Hopefully the United States will catch up with India in our ability to handle wide-spread service interruptions. ~ Greg Johnson