That’s quite the achievement. Though a side note of comparison I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range. Unless I’m misunderstanding what that means, it seems excessive for a modern economy.
30 years ago my local electric co-op was bragging they got transmission losses down to 4%, when the rest of US was 8% (I'm not sure if that is average or some other statistical term).
But yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large
It's mostly about the distance, isn't it? Iirc even with the most modern ultra high voltage lines, it's about 3% per 1000km. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad, even for really long distances (like solar power from some desert to where people actually live).
Distance is a factor. I do not know what they were measuring (the main power plant was about 1000km away, but I don't know if they counted that or if that was ignored because someone else owned those lines). They were a fairly rural utility with most of the area belonging to farmers (but they do have a couple suburbs and a few small towns).
I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.
In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).
There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).
5-6 percent of electricity loss just mean that 5-6 percent of the electricity produced by all power plants in your country never reach the customer. Not that you have blackouts 5-6 percent of the time.
As of now, we cannot do lossless transmission. If some Ultragrok comes with room-pressure and room-temperature superconductors, then maybe.
Czechia is at 5-6 per cent as well, even though our grid companies are quite good. This is the price for having rural areas. Within a single compact city, like Singapore, you can get under 1 per cent easily. One the distances grow to hundreds of kilometers, some non-negligible loss is inevitable.
It’s where you’ll find most countries with a good handle on their electric network, advanced economies or not. You can do better but it requires either very small service distances (so you don’t have transmission losses in the first place) or an extreme dedication to hunting them down.
"The ones who pay will pay" is always true (from people using public transport without a ticket to "normal" tax payers having to shoulder the losses caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%), but resigning to it so explicitly is rare.
Yeah. My impression is, small players exploit the loopholes like there's no tomorrow, big players hire external consultants to give them least-effort playbook and take over liability, as anything more clever is exponentially more expensive.
How is creating your own ETFs to avoid paying taxes low effort?
I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.
Self-employed electricians don't have enough money to need Cayman Islands accounts (many software engineers on FAANG salaries, on the other hand, do, and plenty are already experts in "corporate" tax optimization). Self-employed electricians instead do half their work for cash, and procure materials from untaxed sources.
One of the funniest ideas I heard was that we in South Asia do corruption properly, because unlike the West, even the poorest person gets to be corrupt while in the West you have to have money and know people. Democracy!
It's just not true at all though, and I don't get where the meme comes from other than the politicians pointing their fingers at the rich so we don't look at them. If there wasn't incentive to be homeless, we wouldn't have so many.
I mean this is the case universally, even if the losses aren't in a specific line item the cost of generating that power has to be covered overall
There's usually an incentive to solve this though because this shrinkage, in retail terms, would be handled at the cost of power generated (without any profit margin) whereas if it was sold to a paying customer it'd have a margin built in. If the Greek utilities are allowed to make a profit on that losses line item, that is insane
it depends on how the regulations are written. not every single cost gets to go into the guaranteed return on equity. Probably plenty of examples where it is, but also there are definitely a lot of examples where that's not true. Given how militant most utilities are at preventing theft, either parent comment OP is just being cynical or there is something very off about the situation there vs. most places
In places where the grid is reliable, approximately no one disconnects voluntarily from it, and solar panels are just a nice extra.
It is the places where the grid is failing where solar panels indeed liberate you, but not from the utility overlords, but from incompetent and corrupt governance.
I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago? Cutting electricity loss is one thing, but getting rid of "load shedding" (unplanned power cuts) is the really revolutionary part. It was not uncommon for the power to go out several times a day and you had to rush to unplug expensive appliances (TV, laptop), because when the power came back it was often accompanied by a surge. My office was wired with two sets of electrical sockets, one connected to grid mains and the other connected to the UPS (for important equipment only).
Actually load shedding is planned power cuts. I have seen a schedule published in a newspaper with different regions of the city (not Delhi) and times when no electricity will be available. This is for ppl to plan their day
Load shedding = it was done on purpose, not that it was pre-planned. If a sudden problem occurs, some areas can be cut to prevent wider failure. I would expect this to be largely automatic.
There was some priority order to determine which circuits should be load-shed when there is a power shortage. For example while scouting datacenter sites across Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, I learnt that 220KV lines were not part of load-shedding schedule whereas 66KV lines were. If you took power directly from the power generation company and had contracted power then also you were protected.
Example from year 2003 (city = Pune) [1]. Its hard to read
Excerpt:
The load shedding schedule is as follows:
Group A: Monday 8 am to 11 am, Tuesday 11 am to 2 pm,Wednesday 3 to 6 pm, Saturday 11 am to 2 pm: Navi Peth, Gultekdi I and II, Dhankawdi, Padmawati, Old Parvati I and II, SNDT, G Block, Parsi agiary, City Apollo, Sant Tukaram, Kharalwadi.
Group B: Monday 11 am to 2 pm, Tuesday 3 pm to 6 pm, Friday 8 am to 11 am
I just don't understand why government didn't step in and raise the price of electricity 5x.
It is better to have electricity 24x7 but only 50 watts to run a fridge, phone charger and one lightbulb, than to have electricity 3 hours a day but be running 1000 watts of airconditioners.
I guess perhaps energy theft was too hard to police?
common misconception. In fact, it would probably be cheaper for most people since they wouldn't have to own a generator (or pay for use of someone elses).
Instead, people (especially the poorest) would need to put effort into tracking their own usage - and understanding that an airconditioner uses far more electricity than a phone charger.
This continued even in 2013. Had to finally pay for an inverter because PCs do not have built in batteries like laptops do and work was being impacted.
Useless industries like RO water, gensets, inverters etc are so much larger in India because of governmental abdication of responsibility due to political compulsions. Once you have your own house, or live in a gated community/highrise with its own water/power infra, you get almost western levels of comfort without the messiness of the outside world.
Every house there (that can afford the essential $200 or so) has a Reverse Osmosis water filter because the municipal water supply (if any) is not considered potable.
I remember the inverse of that in Chennai -- scheduled running water for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evenings when we had to stockpile water in every container possible.
We've traded power cuts for pollution. The current government seems energetic enough in trying to fix the problem, but frankly it's something every single developed country in existence went through at some point, so there's probably no escaping it. Hopefully the pollution era will be shorter than it was in other places!
I spent two weeks in Bangalore in 2014. Power cuts happened roughly every other day.
Thankfully, I stayed in a nice hotel with an automatic generator, so the power would cut out for a second or two before the generator came on, and then would cut back out for a second or two a few minutes later when the hotel went back on the mains.
Depends on the season. Until a few years ago Bengaluru had a different problem – when it thundered or rained, they would cut power to protect transformers from shorting out due to falling trees on power lines.
The problem is still there in Bangalore. Power goes out at least once or twice each day even now and so most medium to large commercial institutions have backup generators.
India's ongoing growth, and overall the positive sentiment of the population, is such a breath of fresh air compared to the decadent west.
It's just a shame that you are also speedrunning population collapse. Modi completely ignoring the cratering birth rates under him is a real hero.
It's clearly a massive exaggeration to talk about population collapse, but India has dropped below replacement, and will start seeing a decline in population in the next few decades, so they're heading in the same direction as everywhere else.
(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).
I think we do know how to stop it: Welfare Queens, but really. If you can actually "live large" by doing nothing else than raising a bunch of kids (either with some controls that ensure you raise them well, and/or significant structured investment into rearing kids by the state), people will do that.
The reaction to that idea shows you how undervalued baby production still is. Morons insist that $20k or similar is enough incentive. It's laughable.
Whatever happens with AI "taking all the jobs", this will drive real societal change, because it has to. The options are obscene authoritarianism and removal of bodily autonomy from women so we can just force them to reproduce like society is used to, or actually adapting to what it will cost to encourage women to go through literal trauma and 20 years of really hard work because the rest of society will benefit. Seeing as de-facto enslaving all women is horrific, I hope people see that we should do everything to avoid the first option.
It has to become very attractive to be an average person, with average social standing, with average resources. The uber rich might have to give up some of their share of the pie.
I really don't think we do know how to stop it. Even massively increasing welfare payments has totally failed to produce lasting change where attempted.
It is possible going significantly higher could, but if so we have not yet figured out how high, and it's clear the threshold is much higher than people have tended to think it would be. E.g. look at financial incentives in Hungary, or the welfare system in places like Norway that makes parental leave in many developed countries look like third world conditions.
Rich people do seem to have a somewhat higher fertility rate, so it is possible that you could fund it enough, but the rise happens at high enough income levels I don't think our economy could handle it.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though - I just don't think we know if purely financial motivation would be sufficient at a level that is actually possible (and I do fear authoritarian approaches will end up being tried instead). It might take a lot more effort than that in terms of lightening the burden and/or making it more attractive in other ways.
Only for a year and a bit (parental leave in e.g. Norway is up to 100% of salary for 49 weeks capped at ca $85k, or 80% for up to 61 weeks).
On top of that you get a bunch of other subsidies - e.g. in Norway again, nursery spaces are guaranteed by law and capped at around the $200/month mark, and child support is paid monthly until the child turns 18 at about the same rate.
Norway is below replacement, so we know that rate is too low.
Maybe your 60k/year on an ongoing basis would be sufficient. Whether anyone would be prepared to take the economic hit of trying is another question.
I suspect we'll see a lot of desperate flailing, creeping authoritarianism (e.g. curtailing abortions etc.), virtue signalling (it's your patriotic duty...), and increased reliance on immigration (until that supply also dries for an increasing number of countries) before someone is willing to try to figure out what a high enough number to change it is.
Yeah I think it's too expensive for anyone to really implement it, but I do think if you want it to be a viable choice to not pursue a career for a while (and a year isn't long enough) then it's the only ethical way to do it.
Banning women from working certain jobs or something seems like the authoritarian method instead, and unfortunately easier to implement.
Incorrect. It is 1.48 billion and expected to hit 1.7+ billion in next three decades in a nation that is <1/3rd size of the USA. Birth rate collapse cannot come soon enough.
Both of these comments have an inaccurate view of India in either direction, too romanticized or too doomerized. In reality it's just another country with people trying to do what's best for themselves and their families.
I'm an Indian 1.5 gen immigrant living in the west, and I'm by no means ashamed of my Indian culture or heritage. I would never move to India and I feel sorry for many of my Indian friends or cousins living there. They are too often emotionally stunted people, and held down by India's oppressive work culture.
The one benefit of living in India is cheap household labour...only possible because of a massive underclass of people!
For one thing, Indians aren't giving hormone inhibitors to their children, Illegal immigration is almost universally viewed as bad, and every 10th girl is not an onlyfans starlet. Indians have better chances of being alright, although they lack a strong leader and will likely remain below China.
You mean the government actively scapegoating Muslims/minorities for all their problems? The Hindu nationalist party that has street militias (RSS, Bajrang Dal), anti-minority lynchings and press / university crackdowns? Sounds like a "breath of fresh air" for those on the right side of things
That's just meme spread by left-leaning media in the west, (and their cronies in certain Indian mainstream media outlets) who can't tolerate anyone developing a national identity.
We are 1.48 billion people (and growing) in a nation that is 1/3rd the size of the US. Expected to reach 1.7+ billion in another 20-30 years - which will increase desperation considerably.
The birth rate falling is a VERY good thing. India cannot really support more than 300-400 million people with a high quality of life with its geographic size and exhausted resources. Life becomes cheaper than disposable toilet paper otherwise.
India has roughly ~18% of humanity but only about 4% of global freshwater resources, and agriculture consumes roughly 80–90% of India's water. The World Bank estimates that around 600 million Indians already face water stress. (The number is actually higher in many estimates)
There is also substantial pressure on land. Government data report about 97.85 million hectares, or ~30% of India's geographical area, as affected by land degradation/desertification.
If you want long-term, sustainable agriculture, we need to heavily move to organic farming. This yields ~30% less food produce. I forgot the popular paper on this - can dig it up.
I am not asking for 0 children - that is silly. I just gave a target number for sustainable, high-quality of life in one nation which currently has a very stressed population due to limited resources, ongoing-desertification, exhausted mineral resources and a water crisis. Obviously we should not stop having kids tomorrow. But neither should we subscribe to the birth-rate cliff paranoia where corpo billionaires want the birth rate to increase so they always have access to a desperate population that they can treat as effective slaves.
> If you want long-term, sustainable agriculture, we need to heavily move to organic farming
This is deeply unsupported by the evidence I’ve seen. Organic farming tends to look far more resource intensive than modern methods. Often for little discernible gain in flavor and nutrition.
> You can get the number by just halving our population
I agree with your conclusion given the data, particularly around mineral exhaustion. (Though there is also the issue of severe mismatches. Lots of lithium, for example, yet no battery industry to speak of.)
> This is deeply unsupported by the evidence I’ve seen.
What ? This is well-supported unless you have been sadly brainwashed by the corrupt American Agricorpos - who btw do a terrific job of FUD & misinformation. I even learned this in high-school biology class.
"organic farming generally had higher soil organic matter, lower nutrient losses per hectare, lower energy requirements and generally better biodiversity outcomes"
organic farms with best-practice are sustainable with lower yields and do not cause soil degradation or desertification. Study attached in reply to other comment.
> The research is extremely supported for sustainable agriculture with the corresponding caveat of lower yields
Right. Modern agriculture with minor modifications (atmosphere-derived fertilizer) can yield more on less land with less water input more or less indefinitely, i.e. sustainably. To get the same yield with organic methods you need more resource inputs. It’s more resource intensive.
By the way! I like shopping at my farmer’s market. I do think the eggs and vegetables are fresher and taste better. But I don’t pretend it’s more sustainable. If everyone did what I do, we’d need to divert even more land and water and energy to farming.
No, it is most certainly not indefinitely - "corpo agriculture" only yields more for a limited period of time before land degradation and desertification comes into play. I hesitate to call it "modern agriculture" since that is a moving target.
Please check:
Land Degradation–Desertification in Relation to Farming Practices in India: An Overview of Current Practices and Agro-Policy Perspectives, Sustainability
It is very unfair you got downvoted. Your conclusions might be debatable but sourcing them with so many sources is laudable. I wish all my debate adversaries would drown me in data like you did.
I am hopeful for India. Each time that I visit every five years or so, it feels like a "new country" -- so many things are changing so fast. While Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are not as water-starved as India, they did a lot to become rich with almost not good "minerals" (I assume that you also include oil & gas). Regarding water stress, look at Israel. They switched to as much "drip irrigation" as possible. For non-ag water uses, again look to Israel: You will need a lot of desalination plants. For the interior regions, you'll need water movement infrastructure like California and China.
India can easily become a green energy super power due to its enormous solar productivity. Think of all the industries in the 21st century that thrive with cheap power.
No, Mumbai is significantly more densely populated than Paris when looking at the entire urban scale and not just a few areas of Paris. This is easily fact-checked.
I mean Mumbai's population is 10x Paris population, so this should be obvious.
Wikipedia lists the core city of both as 50,000 per square mile, though it looks like the Mumbai numbers are somewhat old. More recent numbers say 73,000 per square mile for Mumbai. Which is similar to Manhattan’s residential population density.
> I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago?
The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".
Played by Brian George, who I don't think has ever lived in India (his parents did, and he is part Indian, but he was born in Israel and grew up in London and Canada).
There wasn't a single critical word about either the actor, the writer, or anyone else in my comment. Maybe try not to read into a comment things that aren't there. If I'd wanted to criticise anyone, I would have.
I once spent most of the summer in a WW2-era building with no AC in the southeastern US (Ft Benning). I imagine it is both hotter and more humid in much of India.
Short answer is that you get used to it. There was a surprisingly effective swamp cooler that worked about half the time (we got pretty good at troubleshooting it) and several ancient pedestal fans. You can sleep in very nearly any environment once you become sufficiently sleep-deprived.
Every second house had a diesel generator back then. Ours had to be cranked started by hand(not for the heartless) before push button starters became a thing. The shutoff though was simple tug on the switch; I attached a twine that ran to my bedside for shutoff, which was a godsend at 2:00 AM when the power came back on to make those crazy summer days a bit easier to sleep through.
> I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago?
I wonder how many HNers are, or ever have been there in the first place? It seems strange to me to ask who "recalls" what it was like there before. What would such a recollection be based on? There's only so much attention one can pay to what daily life is reportedly like around the world, and that required believing the reports.
At least a quarter of tech professionals in Silicon Valley are born in India. So I would guess a quarter to a third or more of the posters here are Indian origin.
India accounts for a big portion of the english speaking internet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the posters here are Indian origin.
And likely a decent number of non-Indian tech workers have gone to India for meetings. When I was working at a large American tech company, I was traveling to India at least once or twice a year. Obviously, very different to actually living there, but visiting can provide something of an impression.
They don't work nearly as well as the marketing says they do. They might save your equipment from a lightning strike a medium distance away, by absorbing the remnants of the surge that get to you - only once or twice before the protector is dead! - they will not save your equipment from anything that lasts longer than that.
> My office was wired with two sets of electrical sockets, one connected to grid mains and the other connected to the UPS (for important equipment only).
This I think is a standard practice in any large office building in France (Europe? Global?) too, regardless of the frequency of the power cuts. I don't remember witnessing any power cuts in the office (not since long ago anyway), but in most of the places there are systematically white and red sockets, red ones being powered through a UPS. So, server machines go into red ones. Well, we don't have servers anymore, but the sockets are still there anyway. Hopefully UPS too, LOL.
No, this isn't remotely "typical." You have no idea what you're talking about.
The building might be on a generator. The whole building is most assuredly not on UPS.
Even in hospitals only certain outlets are on UPS - the stuff that absolutely cannot be interrupted - though a lot of hospital equipment now has its own battery system, at least in part for convenience.
I don't know if it's still done but semiconductor plants used to use intertia-based grid smoothing/UPS systems to handle millisecond-level interrupts and voltage fluctuations.
Agreed. Nothing actually typical at all for regular "just offices".
I do remember working ~25 years ago at a place that did have those two kinds of outlets. Our computers and monitors would be on the UPS+generator ones, while desk lamps, office lamps etc. were not. But it was specifically because the offices were on-site w/ the two data center complexes the company had and the building I was in happened to also be wired into that whole setup. Not every other one was either, only that one and the 24/7 NOC.
I only knew this was a thing because my office mate's computer was in the wrong kind of socket. One day his lamp stayed on while the computer turned off and for me the other way around. Soon after we heard the diesels starting and had to close the window coz of the fumes.
At full capacity of the data center, the absolutely huge UPSs could run the data center for all of 10 minutes. So that's how long the diesels had to actually start and take over.
I've never seen them in France. I've seen them in a chemistry lab section of a university in New Zealand and I believe they're also common in data centers, NOCs, etc. worldwide.
I think it depends on the building. A typical inner Paris office (converted Haussmann building) won't have it usually, but traditional larger offices I have been to have sockets like this one for example: https://www.legrand.fr/pro/catalogue/triple-prises-de-couran...
But all the nuclear power bros told me electricity in France is uber reliable and bountiful because it's all nuclear! We need nuclear power plants for a stable grid!
It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...
Putting computer systems on UPSs isn't a Europe thing. Backup generators and UPS units are very common, or at least they were until everyone got infatuated with moving all their data "into the cloud" and stopped maintaining, or building, infrastructure in office space for it.
Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.
> It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...
For the recent big outage in France, neither of those was the problem. Some big transformers overloaded and there wasn't enough redundancy.
> Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.
> But hey, it was cheaper, right?
> Oops...
I'm not sure what you mean by "oops". Those datacenters do have downtime but companies seem to be happy sticking with them anyway. It seems like it still saves money.
Unfortunately the water situation is still the same all over India even in 2026. There would be manaoon floods and yet in summer there would be widespread water cuts.
They solved it in Calcutta as well. The load shedding and voltage fluctuations. Growing up it was terrible. Very pleasantly surprised during my stay back home during Covid.
> It was not uncommon for the power to go out several times a day and you had to rush to unplug expensive appliances (TV, laptop), because when the power came back it was often accompanied by a surge.
Two questions: (1) Does a regular surge strip protect against damage? (2) I lived in California in the early 2000s when there were frequent power shortages. We didn't worry about "surges" after the power came back on. What is/was different?
I was working with a company trying to run a render farm. They were based in an old concrete warehouse with high ceilings, but as the company expanded, they ran out of floor space and decided to create a mezzanine floor. So now you had two very low-ceilinged floors instead. And you know what held up the mezzanine floor? Batteries. Huge banks of chained-together automotive batteries. Of course there were conventional Uninterruptible Power Supplies attached to every computer, but those wouldn't survive the entire blackout, so the car batteries and inverters and whatnot were upstream from those.
Looking back at it, it's hard to believe that nobody died...
> In areas where theft was particularly rampant and losses were as high as 83 percent, according to Tata, the companies took a different strategy. These pockets of Delhi were predominantly occupied by low-income families. Tata Power, and later BSES, worked to improve the water supply for these residents and provide educational opportunities, such as instruction in reading and writing in Hindi as well as financial literacy. These efforts focused on the women, who were at home more, and paid them to collect electricity payments from their neighbors. Bill payment rates from these areas are now on par with those of other parts of Delhi
It seems to be an investment in underground distribution structures and advanced monitoring including predictive failure analysis.
However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.
> accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence
I assumed it was something like that when I saw the graph for Singapore. They achieve the veneer of a perfectly clean and orderly society by punitive intolerance of anything else.
You can cause a lot of harm by breaking infrastructure. 10 years in prison is a bit extreme for an accident but it obviously has the desired effect. The current penalty in my part of town seems to be $0 and no time behind bars. My fiber optic internet is cut about once every 2-3 months.
I wonder if something in the middle could work. I feel like if you are legally responsible for a construction job and dig into the forbidden spaghetti that a little bit of mandatory community service isn't exactly an extreme response.
> accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence
Attention HN readers: Brandolini's Law alert! This claim is bullshit. Ask any LLM and they will tell you the truth with authoritative sources. First, none of their laws say "accidental". The laws all say something like "willfully" or "maliciously". And the max is 5 years. Seriously, if accidental line cuts were enough to get a guaranteed 10 year prison sentence, then no one in the world would be willing to dig up anything with heavy machinery in Singapore.
Singapore is also a 730 km^2 island city-state with a population of about 6.2 million people. I have honestly no idea why people and articles keep comparing it to literally the largest countries on the planet both in terms of land area and population. Ask any other wealthy cosmopolitan world city of about the same area and population what their electricity reliability figures are, and the answers will probably be quite similar.
Inb4 (in this case in-after) annoying trope answers (see below) like 'veneer of perfectly clean and orderly society', 'punitive'. It is small; that is why it can get stuff done.
I 100% agree with this. I have great respect for Singapore and all the achievements of that country. But I also tell people to be mindful of the fact that it's a city state and an island.
I agree with your comment. And you don't get freedom of speech, right to protest, nor free media. Plus the same political party has had the majority since the country was founded (50+ years ago!). In Korea and Japan, you can have nearly the same level of orderliness, but none of the insane punishment rules, nor missing freedoms. I hestitate to add Taiwan because it isn't as orderly as Korea and Japan, but it is still very close.
In Hyderabad, India the govt loses around 2 million kWh per day(roughly 50-60 million USD per year) in theft and unpaid electricity bills every year particularly the old city area where residents refuse to pay the bills.
Bill collectors are openly threatened by local elected leaders even in the presence of police.
The state chief minister(similar to a governor) acknowledged the problem and is planning to handover bill collection to a private firm specifically for that part of the city. The opposition is against the move as the area represents a major voting bloc.
Sometimes, policy based solutions work but political will is also necessary to enforce those policies.
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
The article also says Brazil's "problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago", which is very incorrect from what they're describing. Almost none of what is described in the article happened in Brazil 20 years ago, let alone today.
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
I did query ChatGPT and it seemingly wrong headedly suggested that Estonia had closed lots of Oil Shale power which it did have, I am not too up on this.
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
It may be that they over-generate currently to account for the excess losses, which would be very costly given current fuel prices unless most of it is from environmental sources.
It doesn't need to be that amount, just a significant amount, to be worth mentioning. Though even if that much were true, you would have unusually high electricity bills at home [much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets].
They definitely mixed up something here or misunderstood the issue. Having just visited India (Delhi among many other places) in the spring and seeing power cut out at least 2-3 times a day at minimum in every single hotel without exception. I can really only remember a single unplanned power cut in the last 10 years in Estonia and that was the work of a digger happy construction crew. Even Russian sabotaging underwater cables hasn’t directly affected power distribution, other than price.
As far as I can tell, that number comes from the World Bank and it defines electricity loss as a percentage of domestic production. But Estonia imports a lot of its electricity, and that imported electricity is not included on the generation side of the equation.
They split from the Russian grid and it is causing growing pains. Generation is limited to oil and comprised of aging soviet era plants. They are upgrading but it takes time.
tldr; they passed the administration of power from the corrupt government officials to Tata power (part of the Tata conglomerate) and BSES (part of another conglomerate Reliance). They modernized the setup and closed loopholes and avenues of corruption and also made stealing of power by the corrupt sections of public difficult.
India has one thing going for it, sunlight all the time.
India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.
Rooftop is know and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.
Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.
Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.
Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.
Rooftop solar use had and continues to explode in most tier 2 cites where its seen as a great way to save on electricity bills by feeding that power back to the grid. Its one of the few bright spots in a country with relentless expenses and price pressures.
Would argue it is even coming to Tier 3 cities (personal experience from Rourkela, Odisha where I feel like rooftop solar has exploded in the last 5 years)
There are a bunch of new articles of the same happening in Pakistan. During their economic and power crisis of the last 5+ years, rural farmers have been installing rooftop solar at an insane rate. I hope the same is happening in India.
We installed a 5 kWp plant last month. Grid-tied, of course. Our daily usage is in the 12-25 kWh range depending on the season and the plant produces ~12 kWh on the worst days (~35 on the best, so far).
We have been doing our cooking almost exclusively on induction for the last 6-7 years, and I have been trying to get others to switch as well. However, it is difficult to convince people of the benefits. Some Indian cooking requires exposing the food directly to the flames, so piped/bottled gas cannot be completely eliminated.
> Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers.
This seems like it would have unintended consequences. Gated communities are mostly populated by richer classes, right? This could be used as an excuse to not invest in forms of power production that would benefit from larger economies of scale and produce power for everyone.
Richer people can invest and grow the demand, with learning rate costs come down.
Govt doesn't need to provide infrastructure to rich people. Utilities can just focus their efforts on demand/supply management instead of building out costly and time consuming transmission and distribution networks.
I grew up in Delhi during the 90s. We used to have daily power cuts but starting around year 2000 (can't pin exact year), we started having less outages. Since around 2006, we had almost no outages throughout the year. Now, I haven't experienced a power outage in a long time in Delhi
I was curious if the price per unit of electricity has also changed over this time period, looks like that's been pretty much flat: https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D
(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)
Well written. It describes the problem at a fairly high level for engineers to understand and for lay people to see how public policy works when it does.
The next 25 years will see another revolution, the solar residential (and hopefully commercial one) https://pmsuryaghar.gov.in/#/
The government is actively encouraging solar residential and net metering is on...
Since the topic is linked to Delhi..
In dino, garche dakkan mein hain kadre sukhan bahut,
Kaun jaye Zauq, par dilli ki galiya chodd ke
The poet acknowledges that the Deccan region (South India) currently offers better patronage and respect for poets than the declining Delhi. However, he rhetorically asks who could possibly bear to leave Delhi....
The power companies will just say that if they let everyone do that, it will kill line technicians and boom, no one gets solar. Happening in the USA today
Doesn't mean they'll let them be used or connected to the grid. Even if you do that in the USA they charge you the same rate for power from your panels as they do off the grid. You have to have an inspector come out just to get off of that default plan even though it is just a computer account update.
The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.
Well the planet is theirs as well, so one may argue that putting up live wires that can electrocute them is quite cruel in the first place, especially given the lack of any preservation of their natural habitats in most places.
Actually they could have touched the wires as long as they touched only one and nothing which was earthed, but that might be pretty complicated to learn by trial and error, especially if error often means death.
Isn't it pretty unique to learn from seeing? My cat certainly doesn't understand "monkey see, monkey do". In this case it's about literal monkeys of course but I'm not even sure all of them have this capacity. Probably some birds and dolphins and such could learn this way, but not most animals with 'friends' (or late friends)
Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.
Agreed. And nothing is stopping folks from running underground cables except crying about it being more expensive (i.e the true cost vs side effects to other populations so long as it doesn’t affect the consumers).
It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.
> One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods.
This is going to be less effective going forward due to insulation piercing connectors, which simply clamp around an insulated conductor and pierce the insulation to connect to the conductor underneath.
A suitably insane person could also just strip the insulation from a small segment of the conductor, one phase at a time, and hand wrap a splice conductor around the live one and tape it up.
Great news for the monkeys though! I would not want to witness a monkey making contact with two uninsulated conductors on different phases, yeesh.
A couple years ago in Nepal, a large group of monkeys passed by a window next to my table at a restaurant. They were casually strolling on the power lines.
This is going to get a lot of press and it does not mention any ministers or government services. The guy who wrote it is getting transferred in a week.
They do mean loss. Literally losing electricity as heat because of resistance. You can never reduce this to zero, but various problems can compound to increase the loss to ridiculous levels.
Surprised to see my former university director/lecturer appear on HN. She (the author) was very controversial and general not liked towards the end of her tenure by most of my peers. Nonetheless, she was quite good in her field.
SA/rape of a batchmate. She was the director at the time and word was that she was complicit in a PR drive to get this off the news and also ban on campus protests around it.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 97.2 ms ] threadBut yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large
I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.
In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).
There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).
As of now, we cannot do lossless transmission. If some Ultragrok comes with room-pressure and room-temperature superconductors, then maybe.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
For some problems, the closer you get to perfection, the harder the next step is.
DC travels in the whole metal, and while DC is more complex to manage and transform, HVDC transmission is the future
You can steal as much as you want. The ones who pay will pay.
You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.
I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.
/s? There isn’t an incentive to be a war refugee either.
There's usually an incentive to solve this though because this shrinkage, in retail terms, would be handled at the cost of power generated (without any profit margin) whereas if it was sold to a paying customer it'd have a margin built in. If the Greek utilities are allowed to make a profit on that losses line item, that is insane
Until solar panels came to liberate us from the utility overlords.
A failed state will be fail-stating regardless of the technology.
It is the places where the grid is failing where solar panels indeed liberate you, but not from the utility overlords, but from incompetent and corrupt governance.
Actually load shedding is planned power cuts. I have seen a schedule published in a newspaper with different regions of the city (not Delhi) and times when no electricity will be available. This is for ppl to plan their day
Excerpt:
The load shedding schedule is as follows:
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/mseb-announces...It is better to have electricity 24x7 but only 50 watts to run a fridge, phone charger and one lightbulb, than to have electricity 3 hours a day but be running 1000 watts of airconditioners.
I guess perhaps energy theft was too hard to police?
“And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power.”
Collecting more money in a corrupt organization doesn’t means they will automatically get a more effective distribution system.
People wont vote for them if they increased the price by 5x.
Instead, people (especially the poorest) would need to put effort into tracking their own usage - and understanding that an airconditioner uses far more electricity than a phone charger.
Useless industries like RO water, gensets, inverters etc are so much larger in India because of governmental abdication of responsibility due to political compulsions. Once you have your own house, or live in a gated community/highrise with its own water/power infra, you get almost western levels of comfort without the messiness of the outside world.
Btw, what you describe is also true of malls. Basically, every country has shiny malls.
Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.
Isn't that a rolling blackout? Load shedding is the technical term and can happen for a variety of reasons that are not based on policy.
Would never set foot in India voluntarily, now nor then.
Yes that includes china, russia, "the global south"
Maybe USA once Trump is gone.
I am Swedish and only Europe is worth going to.
Thankfully, I stayed in a nice hotel with an automatic generator, so the power would cut out for a second or two before the generator came on, and then would cut back out for a second or two a few minutes later when the hotel went back on the mains.
There are 1.2 billion Indians.
You see, I know it's hard to grasp for some, but everything is really relative.
(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).
The reaction to that idea shows you how undervalued baby production still is. Morons insist that $20k or similar is enough incentive. It's laughable.
Whatever happens with AI "taking all the jobs", this will drive real societal change, because it has to. The options are obscene authoritarianism and removal of bodily autonomy from women so we can just force them to reproduce like society is used to, or actually adapting to what it will cost to encourage women to go through literal trauma and 20 years of really hard work because the rest of society will benefit. Seeing as de-facto enslaving all women is horrific, I hope people see that we should do everything to avoid the first option.
It has to become very attractive to be an average person, with average social standing, with average resources. The uber rich might have to give up some of their share of the pie.
It is possible going significantly higher could, but if so we have not yet figured out how high, and it's clear the threshold is much higher than people have tended to think it would be. E.g. look at financial incentives in Hungary, or the welfare system in places like Norway that makes parental leave in many developed countries look like third world conditions.
Rich people do seem to have a somewhat higher fertility rate, so it is possible that you could fund it enough, but the rise happens at high enough income levels I don't think our economy could handle it.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though - I just don't think we know if purely financial motivation would be sufficient at a level that is actually possible (and I do fear authoritarian approaches will end up being tried instead). It might take a lot more effort than that in terms of lightening the burden and/or making it more attractive in other ways.
If child rearing is a full time job maybe we can treat it like one.
On top of that you get a bunch of other subsidies - e.g. in Norway again, nursery spaces are guaranteed by law and capped at around the $200/month mark, and child support is paid monthly until the child turns 18 at about the same rate.
Norway is below replacement, so we know that rate is too low.
Maybe your 60k/year on an ongoing basis would be sufficient. Whether anyone would be prepared to take the economic hit of trying is another question.
I suspect we'll see a lot of desperate flailing, creeping authoritarianism (e.g. curtailing abortions etc.), virtue signalling (it's your patriotic duty...), and increased reliance on immigration (until that supply also dries for an increasing number of countries) before someone is willing to try to figure out what a high enough number to change it is.
Banning women from working certain jobs or something seems like the authoritarian method instead, and unfortunately easier to implement.
Incorrect. It is 1.48 billion and expected to hit 1.7+ billion in next three decades in a nation that is <1/3rd size of the USA. Birth rate collapse cannot come soon enough.
The one benefit of living in India is cheap household labour...only possible because of a massive underclass of people!
The birth rate falling is a VERY good thing. India cannot really support more than 300-400 million people with a high quality of life with its geographic size and exhausted resources. Life becomes cheaper than disposable toilet paper otherwise.
Source for this carrying capacity?
India has roughly ~18% of humanity but only about 4% of global freshwater resources, and agriculture consumes roughly 80–90% of India's water. The World Bank estimates that around 600 million Indians already face water stress. (The number is actually higher in many estimates)
https://www.worldbank.org/en/brief/2026/03/19/how-india-is-a...
There is also substantial pressure on land. Government data report about 97.85 million hectares, or ~30% of India's geographical area, as affected by land degradation/desertification.
https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
If you want long-term, sustainable agriculture, we need to heavily move to organic farming. This yields ~30% less food produce. I forgot the popular paper on this - can dig it up.
India has also exhausted its mineral reserves. This is not fully our fault. We were fully strip mined and utterly bankrupted in WW2. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
So, if you need maximum ecological comfort, and long-term, prosperous standard of living, we need a significantly reduced population.
This is deeply unsupported by the evidence I’ve seen. Organic farming tends to look far more resource intensive than modern methods. Often for little discernible gain in flavor and nutrition.
> You can get the number by just halving our population
I agree with your conclusion given the data, particularly around mineral exhaustion. (Though there is also the issue of severe mismatches. Lots of lithium, for example, yet no battery industry to speak of.)
What ? This is well-supported unless you have been sadly brainwashed by the corrupt American Agricorpos - who btw do a terrific job of FUD & misinformation. I even learned this in high-school biology class.
"organic farming generally had higher soil organic matter, lower nutrient losses per hectare, lower energy requirements and generally better biodiversity outcomes"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22947228/
“Organic farming enhances soil microbial abundance and activity - A meta-analysis and meta-regression” (2017)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
Land‐use intensity and the effects of organic farming on biodiversity: a hierarchical meta‐analysis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4299503/
Actually, there are dozens of papers. The research is extremely supported for sustainable agriculture. No idea how you got "deeply unsupported".
Right. Modern agriculture with minor modifications (atmosphere-derived fertilizer) can yield more on less land with less water input more or less indefinitely, i.e. sustainably. To get the same yield with organic methods you need more resource inputs. It’s more resource intensive.
By the way! I like shopping at my farmer’s market. I do think the eggs and vegetables are fresher and taste better. But I don’t pretend it’s more sustainable. If everyone did what I do, we’d need to divert even more land and water and energy to farming.
Please check:
Land Degradation–Desertification in Relation to Farming Practices in India: An Overview of Current Practices and Agro-Policy Perspectives, Sustainability
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6383
India can easily become a green energy super power due to its enormous solar productivity. Think of all the industries in the 21st century that thrive with cheap power.
I mean Mumbai's population is 10x Paris population, so this should be obvious.
The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".
I don't personally know that the statement is true, but if that's your issue you should be criticizing the writer, not the actor.
Genuine question - how did people sleep there pre-AC?
Short answer is that you get used to it. There was a surprisingly effective swamp cooler that worked about half the time (we got pretty good at troubleshooting it) and several ancient pedestal fans. You can sleep in very nearly any environment once you become sufficiently sleep-deprived.
I wonder how many HNers are, or ever have been there in the first place? It seems strange to me to ask who "recalls" what it was like there before. What would such a recollection be based on? There's only so much attention one can pay to what daily life is reportedly like around the world, and that required believing the reports.
India accounts for a big portion of the english speaking internet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the posters here are Indian origin.
This I think is a standard practice in any large office building in France (Europe? Global?) too, regardless of the frequency of the power cuts. I don't remember witnessing any power cuts in the office (not since long ago anyway), but in most of the places there are systematically white and red sockets, red ones being powered through a UPS. So, server machines go into red ones. Well, we don't have servers anymore, but the sockets are still there anyway. Hopefully UPS too, LOL.
The building might be on a generator. The whole building is most assuredly not on UPS.
Even in hospitals only certain outlets are on UPS - the stuff that absolutely cannot be interrupted - though a lot of hospital equipment now has its own battery system, at least in part for convenience.
I don't know if it's still done but semiconductor plants used to use intertia-based grid smoothing/UPS systems to handle millisecond-level interrupts and voltage fluctuations.
I do remember working ~25 years ago at a place that did have those two kinds of outlets. Our computers and monitors would be on the UPS+generator ones, while desk lamps, office lamps etc. were not. But it was specifically because the offices were on-site w/ the two data center complexes the company had and the building I was in happened to also be wired into that whole setup. Not every other one was either, only that one and the 24/7 NOC.
I only knew this was a thing because my office mate's computer was in the wrong kind of socket. One day his lamp stayed on while the computer turned off and for me the other way around. Soon after we heard the diesels starting and had to close the window coz of the fumes.
At full capacity of the data center, the absolutely huge UPSs could run the data center for all of 10 minutes. So that's how long the diesels had to actually start and take over.
It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...
Putting computer systems on UPSs isn't a Europe thing. Backup generators and UPS units are very common, or at least they were until everyone got infatuated with moving all their data "into the cloud" and stopped maintaining, or building, infrastructure in office space for it.
Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.
But hey, it was cheaper, right?
Oops...
For the recent big outage in France, neither of those was the problem. Some big transformers overloaded and there wasn't enough redundancy.
> Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.
> But hey, it was cheaper, right?
> Oops...
I'm not sure what you mean by "oops". Those datacenters do have downtime but companies seem to be happy sticking with them anyway. It seems like it still saves money.
Looking back at it, it's hard to believe that nobody died...
This is... interesting on multiple levels.
However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.
I assumed it was something like that when I saw the graph for Singapore. They achieve the veneer of a perfectly clean and orderly society by punitive intolerance of anything else.
I wonder if something in the middle could work. I feel like if you are legally responsible for a construction job and dig into the forbidden spaghetti that a little bit of mandatory community service isn't exactly an extreme response.
4 October 1999 - 27 years ago. It seems my memory still works!
Inb4 (in this case in-after) annoying trope answers (see below) like 'veneer of perfectly clean and orderly society', 'punitive'. It is small; that is why it can get stuff done.
Amazing that places have 50% power loss.
Bill collectors are openly threatened by local elected leaders even in the presence of police.
The state chief minister(similar to a governor) acknowledged the problem and is planning to handover bill collection to a private firm specifically for that part of the city. The opposition is against the move as the area represents a major voting bloc.
Sometimes, policy based solutions work but political will is also necessary to enforce those policies.
Btw even media, some orgs support this criminal behavior and then surprise when good hardworking person turns against them
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
We do not have issues with electricity here or planned power cuts or whatever else.
I would like to see where this professor got his data for losses from. Maybe his data is flawed.
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
"Oh, you sweet summer child"
The existing ones are used only when electricity prices are veey high.
India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.
Rooftop is know and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.
Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.
Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.
Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.
Lots of scope for growth.
We installed a 5 kWp plant last month. Grid-tied, of course. Our daily usage is in the 12-25 kWh range depending on the season and the plant produces ~12 kWh on the worst days (~35 on the best, so far).
We have been doing our cooking almost exclusively on induction for the last 6-7 years, and I have been trying to get others to switch as well. However, it is difficult to convince people of the benefits. Some Indian cooking requires exposing the food directly to the flames, so piped/bottled gas cannot be completely eliminated.
Installed capacity is 5kW. Which is generally sufficient as we use very less power.
I have induction stoves, so gas fuel for kitchen is minimized.
Planning to put a solar based offgrid chiller unit for air conditioning next.
This seems like it would have unintended consequences. Gated communities are mostly populated by richer classes, right? This could be used as an excuse to not invest in forms of power production that would benefit from larger economies of scale and produce power for everyone.
Govt doesn't need to provide infrastructure to rich people. Utilities can just focus their efforts on demand/supply management instead of building out costly and time consuming transmission and distribution networks.
(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)
The government is actively encouraging solar residential and net metering is on...
Since the topic is linked to Delhi..
In dino, garche dakkan mein hain kadre sukhan bahut,
Kaun jaye Zauq, par dilli ki galiya chodd ke
The poet acknowledges that the Deccan region (South India) currently offers better patronage and respect for poets than the declining Delhi. However, he rhetorically asks who could possibly bear to leave Delhi....
A few years back the electricity clean up reached the famous Ghalib Haveli as well
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/historic-ghalib-ki-hav...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_in_animals
Also it would also avoid such incidents.
Minister blames monkey for Sri Lanka nationwide power cut
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8d92n28pqjo
Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/samruddhi-fo...
It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.
This is going to be less effective going forward due to insulation piercing connectors, which simply clamp around an insulated conductor and pierce the insulation to connect to the conductor underneath.
A suitably insane person could also just strip the insulation from a small segment of the conductor, one phase at a time, and hand wrap a splice conductor around the live one and tape it up.
Great news for the monkeys though! I would not want to witness a monkey making contact with two uninsulated conductors on different phases, yeesh.
Although they were some mistakes his government made all in all it’s been a huge success compared to the previous administrations in India.
* https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/trichy/rowdy-gets-1...