You're reading: Power restored across India after historic failure

 NEW DELHI (AP) — Factories and workshops across India were up and running again Wednesday, a day after a major system collapse led to a second day of power outages and the worst blackout in history.

An estimated 620 million people were left without electricity after India’s
northern, eastern and northeastern grids cascaded into failure Tuesday
afternoon. It was the second massive outage in as many days, coming just
after the country had recovered from Monday’s failure of the northern
grid, which had left 370 million people powerless.

Electricity
workers struggled throughout the day Tuesday to return power to the 20
affected states, restoring most of the system in the hours after the
crash. Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters that by Wednesday
morning power had been fully restored across the country.

Moily,
who took over the top power position Tuesday, said an investigation into
the crisis has been launched and he did not want to point fingers or
speculate about the cause.

Other officials said the blackout might
have been the result of states drawing too much power from the grid.
Some analysts dismissed that explanation, saying that if overdrawing
power from the grid caused this kind of collapse, it would happen all
the time.

The Confederation of Indian Industry said the two
outages cost business hundreds of millions of dollars, though they did
not affect the financial center of Mumbai and the global outsourcing
powerhouses of Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south.

Like many, the group demanded the widespread reform of India’s
power sector, which has been unable to keep up with the soaring demand
for electricity as the economy has expanded and Indians grow more
affluent and energy hungry.

The power minister cautioned that
there would be no quick solution to the power crisis, saying the
government was looking at immediate and longer term measures to address
power scarcity.

Part of the problem is that India
relies on coal for more than half its power generation and the coal
supply is controlled by a near state monopoly that is widely considered a
shambles.

A recent survey showed nearly all the coal-fueled
plants had less than seven days of coal stock, a critical level, and
many of the country’s power plants were running below capacity,
according to Samiran Chakraborty, head of research at Standard
Chartered, a financial services company. Government bureaucracy has made
it difficult to bring more plants online.

In addition, vast amounts of power bleeds out of India’s
antiquated distribution system or is pirated through unauthorized
wiring. Farmers, with a guarantee of free electricity that is driving
many state electric boards to bankruptcy, have no incentive to conserve
energy.

The power deficit was worsened this year by a weak monsoon
that lowered hydroelectric generation, spurred farmers to use pumps to
irrigate their fields long after the rains would normally have come, and
kept temperatures higher, keeping air conditioners and fans running
longer.