A worst blackout woke up millions of north Indians on Monday due to most horrible blackout that is not been witnessed for decades. The power supply was refurbished in the evening but no one was aware of the reason behind it. Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister of India, has hired a panel for the investigation and wanted the report within 15 days time. National load dispatch or the NLDC informed that the states like UP, Punjab and Haryana are using more power from the northern lattice than they are authorized which resulted to this power failure. In May 2012 the Central Electricity Regulatory Authority (CERC) had sent a notice to the State Load Dispatch Centers (SLDC) of these states to stop over using the power from the northern grid.
The states were requested to buy supplementary power required to meet the extra requirement during the monsoon/summer. But the states paid no heed to this notice hence breaking the grid rules. As per the database of last month UP drew 3,762MU against the allotted 3,011MU, Haryana 20, 648 MU against allotted 1,817 MU and Rajasthan 1,505MU against the scheduled 1,407MU which is lot more than expected and may be the root cause for the power disaster. Once the report for the month of July is published we would be clear about the extra usage that is responsible for this outage.
There is severe unavailability of fuel for the power plants of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana which resulted to havoc power crisis during the summer. Maximum power deficit that has been reported are 11.5%, 9.7% and 16.3% respectively in the last month. It is also the poor monsoon that has added up to the power crisis here. This major power breakdown has affected the water treatment plants, trains which have stranded the daily life of general mass. Previously this happened in 2001 and was restored within 16 hours. Apart from New Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan and UP were badly affected. Officials claim that the service was totally resumed by the evening.
