The sheer size of this event is amazing -- Fully half the country without power.

Link to CNN story

True the scale is astounding, imagine whoel population of USA x 2 without power...

And its possible it could even be a worldwide event lasting who knows how long.

Events of this scale are had to imagine.

Not really that hard to imagine. A high altitude nuc' weapon burst could cause an EMP which could trigger a very widespread power outage. What's hard to imagine is what this would look like in the second month. Unlike India, much of the damage from an EMP would be to hardware not easily or quickly replaced... or so I've read.

Meanwhile, power has been restored in India.

From that article:

I'm scratching my head on that statement. True that my electrical engineering degree is maybe a couple decades out of date, but I think they probably meant the voltage would have dropped, not the frequency. But then, I specialized in the low voltage side of EE, not the power distribution side. We called those power folks "hummers", because everything they touched hummed.

ok... how do you get an electric wall clock to work on 50.2 Hz?

a 43/36 gear reduction?

I doubt many clocks these days depend on power line frequency as their timebase. It is inheritantly inaccurate.

IIRC, 50.x Hz is normal for a 220/240 grid system. Unlike us in North America, where 60Hz and 110/120 is the standard.

So I guess it just hums a few notes lower.

Except for the microwave all my clocks are battery,I HATE it when the power goes off and the alarm doesnt....GRRRRR!

If I lived in India, this picture of a typical street's electrical system would probably convince me that being without power just might be safer....

Some other good pictures of the blackout here.

Man thats scarey!

I've never wanted to travel to India, this confirms it!

This really is hard to imagine. Electricity in civilization is something I take for granted. There are some things that simply can't be off, such as life support machines, operating room lights during a heart surgery, 911 emergency systems, etc. There are also things like this: you show up at a hospital and they won't treat you because they can't verify insurance coverage in their computer systems. The list goes on and on.

It's easy to think about this type of thing from a healthy person's perspective, but for the sick and people in trouble, electricity suddenly going out can easily be fatal. So, we have electric generators, but eventually the fuel will run out. Also, I highly doubt all of the critical backup generators worked where needed for the 600 million people. I have to wonder, how many people didn't survive as a direct result of this massive power failure?

Let's see. For survival, a human at least needs air, water, food, and shelter. For a modern society of 600 million people, electricity can't be too far down on the list.

Been listening to some interviews from India. Apparently power interruption is so common that many business, and some homes, have generators and battery backups.

Surprisingly, the outage seems not to have caused too much disruption. I can't imagine what things would be like if we had a simliar outage here in north america.

This is from the UK perspective.

You might like this webpage for details and explanation: Renew-reuse-recycle

Quote:
Note: The normal system frequency is 50Hz. As electricity cannot be stored, the instantaneous generation must match the demand being taken from the system. If the instantaneous demand is higher than the generation, the system frequency will fall. Conversely, if the instantaneous generation is higher than the demand, the frequency will rise. System frequency will therefore vary around the 50 Hz target and National Grid has statutory obligations to maintain the frequency within +/- 0.5Hz around this level. However, National Grid normally operates within more stringent 'operational limits' which are set at +/- 0.2Hz.

Europe is now standardised on 230Vac at 50Hz

The standard for 50Hz demands that the AVERAGE frequency is 50Hz exactly over a period of time, I think 12 hours so frequency controlled clocks are self correcting but at any instant may be a little fast or slow, un-noticable.

Makes one wonder what the India version of the ETS forum would be like.

India is a very diverse country, spanning the range between great wealth and cutting-edge technology to deep, grinding poverty.

I think the folks on the low end of that scale could teach us a great deal about practical survival.

The frequency does drop too when the grid becomes unstable. This is long past the point of simple voltage drop. Who the heck remembers all the stuff they learned about system stability 30 years ago, unless they use it regularly? It hasn't changed though...lots easier to properly model now.

One of the results of the big 1965 NE power outage here was that "we" (speaking as if I was still a utility employee) and the U.S. agreed on a frequency detection system. What it does is also detect the rate of change of frequency, much better than just detecting absolute frequency, faster detection of probs. Various parts of the power system within the range of each detector are dumped, depending on how fast the freq is dropping (usually). Every transformer station or larger would have at least one of these, so there are a lot of them and almost everywhere populated would have many.

On the topic of a widespread long-term power outage: The Electronic Armageddon Live: Friday Aug 03 2012

Yes, the power is so unstable there that many businesses have back up plans of sorts but is still very disruptive according to this news link.

Work making potato chip display racks at Jayraj Kumar's factory barely paused when much of India's power grid collapsed.
The backup generators kicked in automatically and the electric saws, presses and welding machines kept running, just like they do during the five-hour power cuts the factory in suburban Delhi suffers nearly every day.
India's unreliable power system has forced businesses to create a workaround electricity system of noisy, dirty diesel generators that prepared them well when the world's worst blackout hit the country Tuesday.
But the trouble has also vastly increased businesses's expenses, dragged down their productivity and hampered economic growth in the country.
"Running a factory is very tough here," Kumar said.

It seems that one of the problems is that farmers have been using a lot of juice for irrigation due to lower than normal rain fall.

Interestingly, an article I read suggested as much as 10% of the energy distributed by the Indian electrical grid is unaccounted for (read stolen).

Many parts of India have multihour power losses every day just to keep the rest of the grid up. Most people and businesses have adapted pretty well.

One thing I read in a technical forum from an Indian power engineer suggested that the big outage was likely caused because the grid controllers failed to shut off power to certain places as they were supposed to as demand rose to an unsustainable level. Probably due to being bribed by some large user(s) to leave it on.

I doubt that the recent Indian power failure resulted in much loss of life.
Power cuts are very frequent indeed, daily in some areas, therefore any person or facility that relies on electricity to preserve life would have been prepared.

This event made world wide headlines because such a large area was affected at the same time.
However in say a hospital operating theatre, a power cut is a power cut, and it matters not if the whole nation, or just a small area is affected. A reliable backup supply is needed in either case.