India power cut hits millions, among world’s worst outages
By Frank Jack Daniel
NEW DELHI | Tue Jul 31, 2012 12:15pm EDT
(Reuters) – Hundreds of millions of people across India were left without power on Tuesday in one of the world’s worst blackouts, trapping miners, stranding train travellers and plunging hospitals into darkness when grids collapsed for the second time in two days.Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, the outage covered states where half of India’s 1.2 billion people live and embarrassed the government, which has failed to build up enough power capacity to meet soaring demand.
Demand. That’s an easy one. Many of you know about portable generators. They come in various wattages. That’s how much you get out of one, quite simply. If the generator is rated for 3500 watts and you try to get 4500, you might get away with it for a moment, because there’s usually a ‘surge’ rating, but if you try that trick too long, the generator trips off.
India’s power grid is like that generator trying to supply too much load. You get to try the trick for a while, but it catches up.
We’ve had the same thing happen here. Despite the scare stories, the American grid is pretty robust. All you people in the nation’s center, sucking up the gigawatts trying to get through the heat wave, you’re welcome. You’re eating more electricity than you produce, but we quite easily have more capacity in other areas and we send that over “The Grid” and you get it. Don’t get nervous. That’s how Kalifagnia survives having hippied itself into a power underproducing state. If the grid dropped all the lines into Kali, the state would be in the dark as they resorted to rolling blackouts, deciding who got power and who didn’t. Electrical triage.
Obama’s hastening our descent into an India-style problem by basically taking a huge block of coal-fired generation out of the picture, placating the tree-huggers with promises of ‘green energy’ and ‘clean energy’. I won’t go into the ways that idea fails, but it does fail. Badly.
Me, I’m in the natural gas biz. That’s what I’m doing in Florida. This state is growing by leaps and bounds and it needs electricity and it’s going to get another big chunk of it courtesy of a natural gas fueled powerplant being built right now even as we put in the compressor station to push the gas into it. The natural gas comes from the fields made productive by the process of ‘fracking’, a thing that’s giving another set of Luddites the vapors. Domestic natural gas is cheap right now, less than 20% of what it was less than a decade ago, thanks to Obama American drillers who have exploited gas deposits previously uneconomical to work, until fracking came along. Gas is around $3.10 for a million BTU’s. Without fracking, there’s not enough domestic gas to supply the nation’s needs, and we get to buy it overseas and ship it here. The price for shipped in gas goes to around $15. Makes for expensive electricity and heating and everything else that burns gas, which is a lot of factories, and when they can’t make money, factories close and jobs go away.
So I’m happy as a clam right now. Really! I get to work on the pipeline no matter where the gas comes from, that’s ONE thing. The other thing is that with the low price of American gas and the HIGH price for that gas liquified and sold overseas, we can build plants to liquify US gas and sell it overseas, making American jobs and making America able to work.
If Obama doesn’t kowtow to the Luddites. A stroke of the pen, and fracking shuts down? An entire industry, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of jobs, all go away. Just like that.
This country doesn’t need to become an India, held back by a struggling infrastructure. And we don’t need to be a Soviet Union, with the nation’s capabilities held hostage by the delusions of the central planners.
