Much of India's electricity supply network collapsed Tuesday in the country's second major outage in two days, affecting more than 680 million people—double the population of the U.S.—and causing business losses estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars
Thousands of offices and factories had to switch to generators or close shop, more than 200 trains were brought to a standstill while hospitals had to ask nurses to manually work critical equipment such as ventilators as 21 provinces experienced a near-total blackout that raised questions about the infrastructure in Asia's third-largest economy.
Metro rail services in the national capital of New Delhi and its suburbs were halted for several hours as well, a spokesman for the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. said. At Delhi's international airport, diesel generators kicked in automatically to ensure operations were not interrupted.
T
he power outage, the worst in India's history and affecting more than half its 1.2 billion population, was caused by the failure of power grids in the early hours of Tuesday.
Rabindra Nath Nayak, chairman of the state-run Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd. said the company is working to restore normal power supply to all the affected regions.
Power Grid operates all the five regional grids—or supply networks—into which India is divided. It runs more than 100,000 kilometers of electricity transmission lines.
The northern, eastern and northeastern grids, all of which failed Tuesday, have a combined peak-hour load of about 46,000 megawatts.
On Monday, the northern grid had failed, affecting power supply in nine provinces for the worst outage in northern India in the last 10 years.
Thousands of offices and factories had to switch to generators or close shop, more than 200 trains were brought to a standstill while hospitals had to ask nurses to manually work critical equipment such as ventilators as 21 provinces experienced a near-total blackout that raised questions about the infrastructure in Asia's third-largest economy.
Metro rail services in the national capital of New Delhi and its suburbs were halted for several hours as well, a spokesman for the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. said. At Delhi's international airport, diesel generators kicked in automatically to ensure operations were not interrupted.
T
he power outage, the worst in India's history and affecting more than half its 1.2 billion population, was caused by the failure of power grids in the early hours of Tuesday.
Rabindra Nath Nayak, chairman of the state-run Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd. said the company is working to restore normal power supply to all the affected regions.
Power Grid operates all the five regional grids—or supply networks—into which India is divided. It runs more than 100,000 kilometers of electricity transmission lines.
The northern, eastern and northeastern grids, all of which failed Tuesday, have a combined peak-hour load of about 46,000 megawatts.
On Monday, the northern grid had failed, affecting power supply in nine provinces for the worst outage in northern India in the last 10 years.
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