India Power Outage: The Shape of Things to Come?

After spending a number of years surveying and taking inventory of US electrical infrastructure, I decided that I wasn’t going to be the ass in this quote:

“In this, as in so many other areas of public life, we are like the ass starving to death because he is equidistant from two bales of hay and can’t decide which way to go. We either have to spend tons of money propping up the old system, or expend tons of effort and thought coming up with a new one. By refusing to do either, we drift faster and faster toward the precipice over which India has just tipped. “

My work for companies contracted to major power corporations was part of the effort to convert the old paper maps and schematics of grid systems into digital format, mainly in the early 90s, though I actually began in the 70s, walking the streets with a big clipboard, drafting equipment, and a measuring wheel. I spent a lot of time hacking my way through rights-of-way, and in manholes under city streets; an on-the-ground way of getting intimately familiar with the extent and condition of our electric grids. I was amazed at what we have built, and dismayed at the level of investment that was going to be required to maintain (and grow) capacity and reliability. I also discovered that investment was, even 20 years ago, grossly lagging requirements. A “pay me now, or pay much more later” progression was underway. The powercos in the US are, and have been, operating on borrowed time, as ASCE has warned. It’s just another can being kicked for the sake of profitability and electability, as with most of our critical infrastructure; the slow, relentless downward spiral to a point beyond recoverability.

We’ve been living off the grid now for 16 years, doing quite nicely, and our expectations differ greatly from the entitled majority. I strongly suggest others develop and implement their resilience plans…

Wow. One of the most informative articles I’ve read in some time.
Thanks!

When there is a black out, that is when you get the opportunity to string your wire to your home to get free power without getting electrocuted.
B)

Remember that India and Pakistan possess hundreds of nuclear weapons. Maintaining their security will become very difficult!!

Incredibly thorough article. I’ve lately been thinking a lot about the costs of infrastructure renewal, if only because I’m traveling in a developing country right now. Stoneleigh writes, “As we move further into financial crisis with the bursting of the global credit bubble, it will become more and more difficult to fund infrastructure investment, and we are living on borrowed time as it is. We have already been coasting on past infrastructure investments for a long time.”

In a massive city like Bangkok, so much of the city appears to have been built between 30 and 60 years ago. It’s all in the same state of decay and disrepair. I’m not sure how long such structures go before they need to be replaced, but I can’t imagine there is enough capital now, let alone in the future, to replace even a fraction of it.

This is a power pole I snapped a couple weeks ago–it’s not as spectacular as the Indian illegal load-sharing wires, but some of the Thai power poles are pretty “impressive” nonetheless.

Nicole, do you really mean that the current grid model is “under threat”, or would something like “extremely fragile” or “failing” be a more accurate description? If it is under threat, what threatens it?

The most comprehensive EROEI research is being done by Charles Hall at SUNY. Anyone who would like to delve further into the specifics should look up the work of Charlie and his colleagues. Some of it appears at The Oil Drum, mostly published by David Murphy. David Hughes, a Canadian natural gas expert, has also looked into the issue in relation to gas supplies. Some of his work is available online.

The problem with EROEI analysis is one of boundary definition.

Where do you set the boundary for input costs?
Where do you set the boundary for output gains?

The costs aren’t uniformly borne and the gains aren’t uniformly shared, so even if you could agree to the boundary definitions, it’s even less likely you’ll agree on methods for measuring individual variables. 500 calories of shoeshining and toilet plunging do not equal 500 calories worth of corner office deal making (never have and never will).

So now what?

This problem plagued the field in the early 1970s when it first came to widespread discussion within the federal government, and the problem persists today.

If nobody agrees to the boundaries of the input costs and output gains, then the #s are largely meaningless.

Your EROEI shows 0.1, mine shows 6. Who is right? Who is wrong? Does your great-grand-baby want fries with that? The spiritual component in unquantifiable. My paradise is your parking lot.

See: US Government Accountability Office from 1977:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/120/119517.pdf

I remember visiting India on holiday in late 2010 during the Commonwealth games. I was surprised by how often the power failed (for short periods under 10 mins) on a regular basis in every destination I visited. In Delhi I refused to use the elevator as the power was off at least 3 times every evening, and I didn’t fancy an extended stay inside a metal booth until someone retrieved me. The elevator was offline after every blackout.

Every computer had a UPS. India must be a UPS maker’s dream. I saw the incredible spaghetti webs of electrical wiring lining some streets. It’s difficult to imagine just how the system can be fixed without a complete revolution in wiring and consumer attitude. I wish India all the best as it’s such an exciting and vibrant nation.

Gurusid –
That is a nice, very comprehensive, LCA. It is a bit out of date, though. It would be interesting to see how the major changes in technology would map out into a current LCA. I think the boundary conditions are the only thing that make nuclear in any way plausible, given the long-term (i.e., 250,000 years), high-level rad waste management requirements. In the reality that will occur, it is not financially or thermodynamically rational to use nuclear. Also, PVs seem to be lasting much longer than we thought they would, which affects and LCA greatly.
I notice that the LCA is assuming large-scale installations of solar photovoltaics, whereas we might consider them as part of personal-scale systems, distributed generation, redundancy, etc. which changes the decision calculus significantly.
While I understand the environmental effects would be the same, when I think of personal resiliency, PV needs to be in the mix. In fact, to be rather thermodynamically preposterous, even if the EROEI on PV were negative (which I do not believe), I think, well, if we are going to make negative EROEI investments (like shale or tar sands), then I’d rather those go to PVs which have a chance of flexibly contributing in a longer term to a better future than those sources that would be burned and gone in an instant.
At the end of the day, without question, the best dollar investment on energy is still spent on improving the insulation and air sealing of buildings – energy conservation – which is half the price per kWh (3 cents USD) of our cheapest US fuel, coal (7 cents USD at least). (I can get the citation for that if you’d like, but it’s 2 km away right now.)
But since we all need to be working on other energy sources, we’d best reduce what we need through energy efficiency and great clothing base layers like wool and silk and dead dinosaurs and then look to having a variety of energy sources. I think PV is still quite rational for individuals, especially on a very small scale – i.e., not necessarily for running a compressor – but certainly for lighting, charging, and so on.
Thank you for your great post and the links to the ISIS project articles!

@Gravity,

Coercion takes many forms, it is part of a government tool kit. Forced/paid sterilization is unpleasant but it works and the alternative is unmentionable cost of uncontrolled population expansion … then, collapse.

Coercion is China’s ‘one child’ policy that punishes people who evade it and have more than one child. The one-child policy is unpleasant. It enrages people in the West but it works and is preferable to the West’s hypocrisy and denial. Part of the one-child policy is forced abortions and sex-determined abortions. The outcome of this unhappy policy is declining birthrates in China … this is the return on policy initiated 20 years ago.

The secondary return is the percentage of China’s current wealth that is accountable to diminished population pressure. Unborn persons cannot consume capital which is then available for other — more remunerative — purposes. Supporting billions in permanent slums at the edge of destitution is not useful allocation of capital.

Better to pay young girls not to have children while giving them the means to avoid conception. Pay one billion (+/-) young girls US$1,000 per year not to have children: US$20 trillion ($1 trillion x 20 years) and old age will do the heavy lifting. The funds would remain in the economies and the payoff would be substantial in real terms at the end of the 20 year period due to capital preservation. The West/Wall Street could make the investment without any difficulty. Instead, governments simply pass the buck and wait for that invisible fist to have its sport with the human race.

Girls that would need the extra US$1,000 are the same girls with the highest birthrates and the lowest earning power.

Certainly you must know that these girls are never going to get rich enough on their own and do quickly enough to give them consumerist choices about their fertility. There are simply not enough resources available, too many fertile young girls, not enough time. Girls reproduce much faster than they can be enriched, in doing so they defeat themselves and their children (along with everyone else).

Paying girls not to have babies is also coercion but events are now outrunning the ability of managers to respond to them. It’s time to get serious or else …

steve from virginia post=4929 wrote:
Coercion takes many forms, it is part of a government tool kit. Forced/paid sterilization is unpleasant but it works and the alternative is unmentionable cost of uncontrolled population expansion … then, collapse.

@steve from virginia
‘Unpleasant’ is an inadequate euphemism for utterly repugnant crimes of this magnitude.
You really do have to read those linked articles to understand what ‘coercion’ means here, on what scale this is happening.
From overwhelming anecdotal evidence it is clear that these are severe crimes being perpetrated, systematically violating human rights, and these brutal sterilisation campaigns target ethno-religious minorities, which mostly happen to be the local underclass, so they amount to a crime against humanity, genocide by UN definitions, forced mass sterilisation of defined minority groups or entire populations.
This kind of violent coercion is not acceptable as policy because it is outrageously criminal, and it does not ‘work’ to lessen suffering due to overpopulation because it causes [greater] suffering more deliberately and more certainly than effects of overpopulation, by means of ‘policy’ which are not statistically generalised and probabilistic, but acutely accountable and determinate.

Societal or individual suffering caused by overpopulationary poverty does not involve criminal complicity by legally accountable moral action, whereas the extent of such suffering cannot be readily quantified in the aggregate of society and causally isolated to absolute population size.
Violent coercion [to remediate overpopulation] does involve such moral complicity, entailing [complicity in] acts which include crimes against individuals, communities and humanity, and such coercion is readily quantifiable in degrees of criminal complicity and in terms of material damage/bodily harm to individuals.
Therefore, the effects of overpopulation are demonstrably legal, if unpleasant, whereas the means of violent coercion to prevent overpopulation are distinctly criminal, and demonstrably more unpleasant.
The resultant suffering by such violent coercion is more morally reprehensible [as caused by deliberate political practice] than overcrowding-related suffering.

In the context of coerced population control practiced in India and China, the euphemism of ‘coercion’ must be rectified to its proper meaning- criminal violence. This involves directly assaulting reproductive health, without peoples consent and against their will, inflicting permanent bodily harm and mental anguish.

This coercion is dissimilar from the less damaging social-engineering forms of incentives and disincentives, paying women not to have children, or punishing them financially if they do.
Rather, it takes the form of government health enforcers coming to a village and denying people access to basic necessities, water, food, until the men and women agree to be sterilised under threat of expropriation, ruination or death, which amounts to a technique of terrorism.
Sometimes the health officials trick the villagers into undergoing an operation under false pretenses ‘to improve their general health’, and pregnant women are sterilised without their knowledge, causing them to miscarriage, often with medical complications and infections.
This practice amounts to severe medical malfeasance, aggravated assault, murder and mayhem.

In regards to the exposed practices in several countries, the forms of ‘coercion’ used for government-sanctioned population control are therefore reducible to the criminal meaning of physical violence or intimidation, threats of violence, against peoples health, livelihood and social viability.
This is beyond the unpleasantness of monetary incentives and disincentives, and descends into the realm of eugenicist soft genocide.

steve from virginia post=4929 wrote:
Coercion is China’s ‘one child’ policy that punishes people who evade it and have more than one child. The one-child policy is unpleasant. It enrages people in the West but it works and is preferable to the West’s hypocrisy and denial. Part of the one-child policy is forced abortions and sex-determined abortions. The outcome of this unhappy policy is declining birthrates in China … this is the return on policy initiated 20 years ago.

You should realise that forced abortion and infanticide is murder, and that this criminal practice is not incidental but systematically committed on entire populations. This is not ‘unhappy policy’ as such, but a genocidal crime against humanity according to lawful definitions. You could argue that ‘hypocritical’ western law and morality is wrong on this, and that the goal of declining birth rates justifies the most violent means, but its just not so. To not believe in human rights is to deny one’s own humanity.

Again, if you’re familliar with chinese practices, such violent state crimes against humanity may ‘work’ to lessen overcrowding, but do nothing to lessen suffering, suffering being the principal effect of overcrowding. In fact, its established that these practices deliberately cause clearly accountable suffering, readily quantifiable, while not preventing any suffering beyond generalised statistical probabilities of overpopulationary poverty, unquantifiable.

Furthermore, in part due to this abhorrent practice of coerced female infanticide [along with social status afforded by male offspring and the dowry system], India and China are showing increasingly skewed demographics towards the male gender. About 5-10% of all girls in those countries are aborted or infanticided now. This trend, promoting masses of unmarried men who are socially dysfunctional in strongly family-oriented communities, results in increased crime and societal stress, elevating the probability of war or violent revolution.

The elderly in these countries also rely on extended family structures for a pension plan, which is destroyed by coercively controlling family size to one-child, whereas one-child ‘policy’, regardless of degrees of violent enforcement, causes the workforce to halve every generation, and labor productivity cannot consistently double to compensate. The cultural knowledge pool is equally diminished in this way, as the level of knowledge held by individuals cannot double every generation. Therefore, a one-child practice is inherently unsustainable in economic and cultural terms, and may yet cause greater suffering.

If my own government was practicing these forms of violent assaults on people’s reproductive health, and no democratic recourse was available to abolish said practice, I might rightfully advocate and pursue the violent overthrow of such a criminal government. Its a matter of self-defense of personal health and reproductive rights, survival of the family, and of principle; official accountability under the rule of law and unconditional respect for human rights are minimal prerequisites for just governmental policy.

steve from virginia post=4929 wrote:
The secondary return is the percentage of China’s current wealth that is accountable to diminished population pressure. Unborn persons cannot consume capital which is then available for other — more remunerative — purposes. Supporting billions in permanent slums at the edge of destitution is not useful allocation of capital.

This is a malthusian full-retard argument.
You mistakenly assume that the poor can only consume and never produce, that slum-dwellers must be supported by allocation of productive capital, rather than subsisting off the affluent waste of industrial society, that they have no inherent right to exist, contrary to capital itself, and that their lives are not inviolate social capital which only they themselves may [re]allocate.
And you further assume that capital resource stocks are fixed in quantity and cannot be expanded, that their use can not be made more efficient. Maybe against all odds one of those slum dwellers would have gone to college, started a business and finally commercialised cold fusion, if having been born. But I agree that slums are largely unproductive and inhumane means of existence, and that actual policy to minimise poverty, extend upwards social mobility and lessen the growth of slums is paramount, but not by genociding slum-dwellers or preventing their birth by violent coercion.

Anyway, I do hope to change your mind on this coercion practice, its far worse than you might think, violently dehumanising [moreso than starvationary overcrowding], and morally a false dilemma.

Why no debate on energy reduction?

While there is a lot of media attention and focus on ‘alternative’ energy sources, there is little in the way of discussion on energy use and reduction. Often reports on alternative energy are linked also to the potentials for ‘jobs and growth’. But little attention is paid to the possibilities that might be entailed by a proactive move towards a lower energy economy, that it too might provide sustainable jobs and if not growth then certainly a vibrant new economy in energy reduction and conservation. However, as Ozzie Zehner points out in his book “Green Illusions” (2012, University of Nebraska Press), this is due in part to the way the media functions. Not because of direct control from the same corporations that own the media as own the energy and manufacturing concerns, but more from the general way the whole media system works:

“Flirting with Truth
Objectivity in journalism is frequently, yet mistakenly, understood as truth. Facts are slippery things, and news organizations understand that attempting to sell them directly would be shear folly. Instead, news organizations operate through proxy. Journalistic objectivity is not so much a rendering of truth as much as it is an attempt to accurately convey what others believe to be true. In order to achieve this rendering, experienced journalists instruct young journalists to keep their own beliefs and evaluations to themselves through a conscious depersonalization. Second, mentors instruct them to aim for balance, or field “both sides” of a controversial subject without showing favour to one side of the other. The news industry generally accepts this framework as the best way to go about reporting on issues and events. It’s certainly a lot better than some of the alternatives. Nevertheless, this truth-making strategy carries certain peculiarities.
For example, news editors tend to judge stories supporting the status quo as more neutral than stories challenging it, which they understand as having a point of view, containing bias, of being opinion laden. Investigations that present empirical evidence and consider unfamiliar alternatives are not as valued as the familiar “balance of opinions.” As a result, journalists reduce energy debates to a contest between alternative-energy technologies and conventional fossil fuels. We have all witnessed these pit fights: wind versus coal for electrical production, ethanol versus petroleum for vehicular fuels. Pitting production against production effectively sidelines energy reduction options, as if productivist methods are the only choices available. Have you ever seen news segments that pit solar cells against energy-efficient lighting or that toss biofuels in the ring with walkable communities? Probably not. I have so far come across only a handful of examples out of thousands of reports.
Pitting production versus production seems natural, but it leads to some unintended effects. First, these debates set a low bar for alternative-energy technologies; its not difficult to look good when you are being compared to the perfectly dismal practices of mining, distributing, and burning oil, gas, and coal. Imagine if wine critics judged every Bordeaux against a big bottle of acidic vinegar that’s been sitting in grandpa’s cupboard for two decades; it would be difficult for a winemaker to perform poorly in such a contest. Secondly, journalistic dichotomies reduce apparent options to an emaciated choice between Technology A and Technology B. This leaves little space for non-technical alternatives. It also misses negative effects that both Technologies A and B have in common. Finally, pitting alternative-energy technologies against fossil fuel gives the impression that increasing alternative-energy flows will correspondingly decrease fossil-fuel consumption. It won’t – at least not in America’s current socioeconomic system…” (p.154-6)

Further:

“Understaffed news rooms increasingly fall back on source journalism – initiating stories using material distributed by public relations firms and corporations. (This contrasts with the more time consuming practice of investigative journalism.) Today about half of news stories arise from press releases. This helps explain the nauseating barrage of articles touting new green gadgets, which are simply rewritten press releases from companies promoting their products or researchers eager to attract attention (and funding) for their often half baked schemes. Readers and viewers have a hard time distinguishing between these rewritten PR scripts and traditional journalism. Reported uncritically and replicated in bulk quantities, these pieces toke news users on the kind of consumerist high typically achieved only through infomercials.” (p.159)

He goes on to describe how BP put solar panels on their filling stations, with phrases like “Plug into the Sun” and “We can fill you up with sunshine” (p.160) as if this somehow offset the contents going into the tanks. In this information age of ‘info-tainment’ it is not surprising that the general populace hasn’t got a clue; he points out that many see energy efficiency as boring and the more glamorous PV cells and wind turbines as more appealing to the entertainment hungry populace – of course it won’t be nearly as boring as sitting in a cold and draughty house (or tent!) when you are flat broke and can’t afford the heating costs – wishing you had invested in some insulation (or thermal underwear!)

It seems that instead of preparing for a much more frugal future we are rushing like lemmings towards an energy cliff that will have a similar effect (without the encouragement of a film crew shooing us off – even lemmings have a basic self preservation instinct).

But all is not lost. The example of the late Edo period in Japan (1603-1868) is examined in Azby Brown’s “Just Enough” (2009, Published by Kodansha International Ltd). It shows how a society turned back from the brink of environmental disaster and economic collapse to produce a flourishing culture that was truly sustainable, proving that it is possible to change direction.

L, Sid.

Gravity wrote:

P.S.
For the West to not appear hypocritical and insensitive to local poverty, rather than sending India funds to enable these murderous practices, or condoning chinese affairs, the West should fund mass-adoption programs instead, adopting those unwanted children to supplement the declining western labor pool and remediate low fertility rates. Japan for instance will soon be in need of millions of fresh people from elsewhere as their domestic birthrate plummets from 1.21 to 0.21 as a result of chronic fukushima exposure.

Or maybe move westerners to India:

L,
Sid.