“The Indian electrical grid, said Arshad Mansoor, the senior vice president for research and development at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., is like “a whole bunch of rubber bands.†Cutting some, he said, might make no difference, but cutting another one could make the web fall apart,†Matthew Wald wrote in The New York Times.
The area blacked out in India is effectively a single, interconnected grid, which means that power is transmitted through it almost instantaneously, as are imbalances, Raj Rao, an American electric company executive who is a frequent visitor to India, told Mr. Wald.
India is chronically short of generating capacity, but that still does not explain outages like those that happened Monday and Tuesday:
The most likely mechanism was a botched attempt to black out a small area temporarily, Mr. Rao said.
For e xample, he said, if the generating capacity was 120 megawatts and the available capacity was 100, that would require unplugging 20 megawatts of load.
“My hunch is, somebody fell asleep and they did not cut off the 20 megawatts,†he said. “And that's where you run into trouble.â€
When demand on the generators runs higher than they can satisfy, they automatically disconnect themselves to prevent mechanical damage, and as each one drops off, it makes a cascade more certain, he said. The first generators would cut out in a fraction of a second, he said.
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