The number of people without power in India is well beyond my range of comprehension. Per today's New York Times:
About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country's northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day.
The population of the United States is 314,063,845, so nearly two United Stateses? I need a map.
As it happens, a blog called Maps of the World built exactly what I was looking for:
India's regional electric grids overlaid on top of a map of India's states, with the blacked out grids highlighted.
After the jump, let's break this down a little with closer look at the grids and also how the population is distributed.
I haven't looked up the electricity grids of many other countries, so maybe this is typical, but I was really surprised at how transparent the India electric system is. This may also be a symptom of their particularly complex energy demands and the effort to workshop solutions to balancing supply and demand.
This map of the regional electric grids comes from a particularly enlightening 2007 paper (pdf) on the India energy distribution situation:
NOTE: pdf link
The previous page of that paper shows India divided into two grids, the Southern grid and everything else, but whatever the purpose that two grid perspective shows, it seems clear that the regional grids are still significant because the outages fall along those delineations.
Monday's blackout was just the Northern Region grid. AFP puts the number affected at 300 million (approximately one entire United States).
Here's the VOA's map of the outrages, matching the Northern Region grid:
The AFP map includes an extra state, outside the Norther Region grid, but the VOA map aligns exactly. I'm not sure if the extra state on the AFP map is a sign of overlap in the grids or maybe an early glimpse of what was to come the next day when the Northern, Eastern and Northeastern regional grids went out. That's what the map up top is showing and here's how India's IBN Live showed it:
Seeing the cities mapped brings us to the other part of the equation. Where is India's population within these outages?
A site called Maps of India has the best, most recent (2010) map of India's population distribution I could find:
Ah! Yes, that does look like a recipe for 600 million people without power.
Digressing now, but this is still interesting: While looking through population maps of India I also found this one from a 1988 study comparing the grid regions, divided into time zones, and population distributed over longitudinal regions.
The idea was to see if instituting some kind of daylight saving time might save India some energy. Apparently the results were not encouraging.
Lastly, for pure map porn, here's a "gridded population cartograpm" of India:
From this really cool collection by Worldmapper.
Leave a Comment:
Thank you SO MUCH for researching and posting this, Will!
Yeah, This post has more maps, more different explanatory maps, of India than I have ever seen in one place at one time.
And the last one is killer
India is really at the front of developing off the grid solar for the undeveloped parts of the country, quite a bit of it actually.
I guess there is more than just a green benefit to being grid independent.
Interesting posting. Well done. Thanks Will.
Okay my question is does this outage mean the call centers wont be bugging me?
One thing apparently, they are not taking into account properly with natural gas being 1/3 the carbon dioxide emissions of other fuels are the increased growth of these developing countries. If with gasoline and coal are now causing Global Warming problems with the current carbon dioxide emissions, it would not be long before the use of natural gas and the developing countries growth increase come back up to the carbon dioxide emissions of gasoline and coal. Thus the use of natural gas is really a mute point and not really a viable solution to Global Warming. We are having problems now with extreme weather storms and droughts that will be getting worse as time goes on. A much more better approach needs to be developed, if we are to make any real changes in carbon dioxide emissions.
So, WHY did this happen? From what I've seen it's because demand was too great. One would think that Democrats could relate well to this, India has lots of demand, which brings everyone prosperity, yes?
Well no. Apparently Govt makes building power plants difficult. Sounds familiar.
When you talk about building power plants that is nonsense. Those regulations for building power plants is there for good reasons. And if anything, India is too slack in their construction of power plants. U.S. power plants are built to last, India's is not.
Actually, it has less to do with building power plants than with the transmission grid itself. India has been ignoring its infrastructure for 60 years - it was only a matter of time before something massive happened.
Asia financial writers have been predicting something like this for a long time!!!
When they are trying to justify this fracking, it is really ridiculous, since it is impossible to assure any safe fracking. Even if the area is in bedrock there will be cracks in the bedrock that will cause leaks that can lead to water sources. And what about the location of the fracking area in the ground and how close it is to water sources, especially if people have water wells? The water well could have been drilled near or through the fracking area and that will cause a leak path right to the persons water source. Pouring a little bit of concrete in the area where you are going to drill through is not a solution, especially when you are than drilling sideways away from where the concrete pad is. Nothing is encased around the fracking area and you will always have leak paths, regardless what kind of excuses they try to make. If big oil wants to talk so big, then they should 100% guarantee their fracking at a heavy price, but they will not do that anytime soon. And if big oil does, they are lying, because in the end it is the people living near the fracking who really pay the price. There is far better solutions, then what big oil wants to pull.
There is a warning in all of this for the United States. Has everyone forgotten about the storms that hit the mid-Atlantic states late June of this year? The amount of people who lost power was a DIRECT result of the lack of spending on our infrastructure!
We have been told over and over that power lines have to be buried underground to keep these week-long outages from happening again, but nobody wants to pay those costs, certainly not the power companies and certainly not the people who have to pay power bills. So, we wait for the next bad storm.....
While I doubt that the United States infrastructure is quite as bad as India's, if we don't invest in infrastructure improvement now, we COULD be there within 20-30 years.
I agree with you on the power lines, we definitely need to do something about our power transmission lines, especially to improve the efficiency of the lines. But with the Republican majority in Congress, I doubt anything will be done anytime soon.
@once Re: #7
The problem with the electrical grid is not only the vulnerability to storm damage - we need more than buried cables.
The 2003 Northeast Blackout was a domino effect.
We need a "Smart Grid" - from wikipedia:
Reliability
"The smart grid will make use of technologies that improve fault detection and allow self-healing of the network without the intervention of technicians. This will ensure more reliable supply of electricity, and reduced vulnerability to natural disasters or attack.
Although multiple routes are touted as a feature of the smart grid, the old grid also featured multiple routes. Initial power lines in the grid were built using a radial model, later connectivity was guaranteed via multiple routes, referred to as a network structure. However, this created a new problem: if the current flow or related effects across the network exceed the limits of any particular network element, it could fail, and the current would be shunted to other network elements, which eventually may fail also, causing a domino effect. See power outage. A technique to prevent this is load shedding by rolling blackout or voltage reduction (brownout)."
If I've told them once, I've told them a hundred times, don't use the hairdryer while the microwave is running!
Wow - great maps. Never too many maps. Thanks.